


Til You Know You’re Gone

by Digs



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fly Fishing, Post-Season 2, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 12:16:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4262985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Digs/pseuds/Digs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s dead, so he goes to the cabin. Alana comes to find him. Light, more new light, always arrives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Sister Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXfG9vqyZws) by Perfume Genius. "Light, more new light, always arrives" is a quote from [At Thomas Merton's Grave](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/237490#poem) by Spencer Reece.
> 
> Content warnings: Very little actual violence, but dwells on the aftermath of Season 2 and all that entails. Will gets separated from his dogs, but no animals are harmed. Not Season 3 compliant. If you have concerns, please reach out to me [on tumblr](http://dignityisforotherpeople.tumblr.com) and I’d be happy to talk to you about it.
> 
> Thanks to aphilologicalbatman, callowyn, my entire writing group, and my mom, the best mom of all moms, for reading drafts of this story and listening to me talk about it endlessly with very great grace and patience.

Yes, if there is justice,  
though I have said there is none,  
I will die in spring, this season I love least  
of beginning all over, I of no patience,  
when hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind  
banging and banging itself to pieces.  
—“Postmortem Georgic,” James Richardson

***

He’s dead, so he goes to the cabin.

Two days went by that he can’t remember, though the nurses said he was awake, sometimes, after the first one. On the third day, when he asks for Abigail, the nurses make sure somebody comes and talks to him, somebody with clearance for this sort of thing. She leads with Jack and Alana: still critical. Your assailant: missing. And Abigail. She says something more polite than dead, but dead is what rings through his ears, whites him out. He can’t really hear anything else she says. It was good she led with the good news, probably. He feels like he’s seeing from behind his eyes. Derealized dissociative state, he thinks, absently.

The surgeon comes to see him, a rangy, fast-talking white guy, who seems like he’s telling a joke no matter what he’s saying. “We thought you were a goner,” he says, shaking Will’s hand. “Never seen anyone fight so hard to stay down.” Shoulder clap. “Welcome back.” And exit.

Penetrating abdominal trauma, and how; the scar is fully eight inches. Staples scraggle across his belly in gothic style. He’s reanimated matter, pulled off the morgue slab. Or out of the freezer case—an eight inch wound and no damage to the internal organs. To the meat.

The nurses tell him later that he kept asking for the ambulance, when his morphine got low. Wouldn’t settle down when they told him he was in the hospital already. “Not my ambulance,” he says.

He can’t think what to do about the dogs, spends fully twenty minutes glitching _Alana-Beverly-Jack-Hannibal-Abigail_ before he gets the nurse to bring him his cell phone. He looks through the contacts, one by one. There aren’t many. Brauer makes a predictable joke about his hourly rate, but he goes over right away. He sounds genuinely sorry when he calls back to say they’ve all been taken to the pound, Shadow got loose and bit the neighbor’s kid. It’s just another concussive wave of no-sound. He’s not going to be hearing right for a while.

It makes sense, though, that the dogs are gone, because the dogs were for his soul, and you don’t get to keep everything when you get brought back. He’s suddenly fiercely glad that he has no psychiatrist to ferret that out of him, pencil poised.

When Brauer calls back, to offer to try to wrangle custody back from the pound, Will says no. Says he can’t manage them, now. Says thank you.

***

He leaves the hospital as soon as they’ll let him, sooner than they’d like. He wants to head north right away, but he ends up being too weak to manage much beyond eating and sleeping for a few days. He resists the temptation to take too many Percoset by taking none. It hurts, but he’s dutiful about his antibiotics, and when he changes the dressing there’s no sign of infection. He holds on to that grim satisfaction.

He eats canned soup and apples and peanut butter and coffee, and nobody begs him for a lick of peanut butter off his finger, and as soon as he’s only horizontal 12 hours a day he starts getting ready to go. The car goes in for a tune-up and he checks his sump pump and starts excavating the geologic formation of laundry in the closet. It’s still dirty from three, four weeks ago, and it’s mostly his new clothes, his makeover clothes; he puts them away in a bottom drawer and packs Beefy-Ts and flannel.

The day before he leaves, he cleans out the kitchen. He packs up some of the staples, the ketchup, the canned food; he can’t remember if he’s got clingwrap up at the place so he sticks it in the box too. The rest gets chucked—all the dog food, too.

Awful pain lances through his gut when he lugs the bins out to the street, and he has to stop and pant at the side of the road, hands on his knees. He walks back up to the house carefully, checks his bandage, lies down. Dinner waits til 10pm.

Sleep isn’t easy, and morning comes slowly, but finally it’s dawn and he gets up, nervy with the gray anxiety of travel. He puts the lights on timers, turns the thermostat down, gulps instant coffee and washes the mug out in the sink. The rumble of the garbage truck filters in to him as he’s shutting off the water; he brings in the bins and locks up, stamping his feet against the March chill.

The sun’s made a clean break of the horizon, gilding his house in rose-gold light. He’s seen it like this so many times, throwing a coat over his undershirt to follow the dogs outside, a steaming mug between his hands—heading back to bed afterward, the dogs flopping to the ground in a chorus of stretches and yawns.

But the sun is up and it’s time to leave. He turns himself away from those thoughts and folds into the car, checking the passenger seat: empty. He revs the engine.

 _I am alone in this darkness_ , he thinks, and if it wasn’t a prayer before, it is now.

***

Normally he does this drive in one long, grinding day, finding what calm he can in the steady roll of asphalt beneath him, but he’s not quite stupid enough to try it this time, with his belly aching by the fourth hour.

On the second day he watches the land get less industrial as he passes away from Detroit, turning scrubbier, pinier. On the Mackinac Bridge the water far below shines like foil: Huron to the right, Michigan to the left. He sails above the strait and lets himself imagine for a moment that he’s down there, really sailing, buoyant and sure on deep water.

It’s cold, and the sky is a steely gray; he flicks the radio on, worried about snow. Maybe, maybe not, say the too-bright radio voices. They cut to a section on local crime and he slaps it off.

Lunch, groceries, and a couple cords of good firewood in St Ignace, and then the last leg, into the deep woods. There’s barely another soul on the road.

The long gravel drive leads the way and narrows as it goes. Some of the oldest trees on the property rise up on either side, and the understory is dark with brambles. The gravel crunches underneath as the car noses deeper into the woods. The path takes a sharp curve, and as he rounds the bend, he has the sensation of crossing into one of the world’s hidden places: the path opens into a wide clearing, light and bright, and in the center his house sleeps patiently, cradled by the woods all around. He pulls into the end of the drive and opens the door, feeling suddenly light-hearted in the rush of cold, clean air.

It’s cold as penguin shit inside, as his dad would have said, but the roof is still up and none of the windows are broken. Good start. He flicks a light switch experimentally and says a little prayer of thanks to no one when it comes on.

The space heater on full blast will help take the edge off while he starts on the fire. While the kindling is catching, he plugs in the fridge and puts away the food, and by the time he’s done the stove’s ready to get going on some proper logs.

Next, water. He starts checking the pipes. No obvious bursts or warps, no cold spots signaling ice inside, so he starts the well pump, opens the valve, checks the taps one by one. The bathroom fixtures all gurgle back to life, and he dares to hope that he won’t have to do any plumbing this time, but then the kitchen sink trap springs a leak and he swears at it with all the vigor of a kid from the boatyards.

The sink can wait. He leans against the kitchen counter and looks over the cabin, taking a deep breath. There’s something he loves in this, the ritual of waking this place up in the spring, step by painstaking step, transforming it from a post and clapboard shell into someplace warm and safe, snug as a matchbox. It’s not about making life into art, he thinks, with a stab of bitterness. It’s not like that. It’s something else. A home has its own life, its own long breaths in and out, warmth that rises and ebbs, steady cycles of water, fuel, waste. It’s not alive, but it shines with the animal life inside it like the moon shines with the light of the sun.

He sways on his feet and drops into a chair, the exhaustion finally crashing over him. He thinks of all he has left to do and it’s all he can do to keep tears from springing into his eyes. Instead he plows mechanically through a tray of deli mac and cheese and lays his head down right there on the table—if the dogs were here they’d start nudging him, worried, because “head on table” is not an acceptable position—he levers himself upright and forces himself to make up the bed, pulling the mattress and all the linens out of the triple-thick anti-mouse plastic bagging he left them in, last August, when he thought all he was facing was his Intro Profiling students trying to talk to him in the cafeteria; on that thought, bed not so much made as piled up, he crawls in, and tumbles into sleep.

He shivers himself awake at some godforsaken hour, having burrowed himself into a ball in the center of the bed searching for warmth. The fire’s dead—he fell asleep without banking it for the night, and the cabin is agonizingly cold.

He lays there in his huddle, trying to convince himself that if he just curls a little closer around himself, he’ll warm up, in just a minute. The wind sighs in the pines outside. He drifts just shy of sleep, his mind wandering through memories: rehab, the drive, packing up the house in Wolf Trap … he runs his winterizing checklist over in his head three times trying to quash a baseless suspicion that he forgot to turn off the water before he pushes up out of bed in disgust, swearing and hopping a little at the cold burn of the floor.

Once he gets the stove going again he scoots back into his warm spot and forces himself to focus on the crackle of the fire. His worries hover nearby, but soon enough the cabin must really start to warm up, because darkness pulls him away.

***

In the weeks that follow, there’s enough to be done that he doesn’t have to think about anything else. Every time he turns around there’s something that needs work: fixing the sink, evicting the mice that have wintered over inside, plugging up the drafts. It’s easier to focus now than it used to be. His mind isn’t so unruly. Vast parts of him, the wounded, monstrous parts, are numbed to a dull white, and only a small animal life in him moves, tending to its den.

More than food or work, it’s the rhythm of the stove that organizes his day. The old habits come back to him: run the first fire of the day hot and open for twenty minutes to burn off the creosote, pack in the biggest logs at night to keep the fire glowing til morning. The wood he chopped two summers ago is well-seasoned now, and he takes satisfaction in hauling it over from the shed and watching it burn up, hot and clean.

It’s the simplest drive he can hold onto: make a little more heat and light, keep buoying up against the dark.

Each night, as he falls asleep, he thinks about the faint plume of smoke rising from his chimney in the dark. There’s nothing else around for miles, only tall trees and scudding clouds. It’s not the flame that draws him, but what’s flung from it, the paths the eddy takes in the high free air above the forest.

***

If he’s tired enough, he doesn’t dream, so it becomes his business to be tired. He recaulks and weatherstrips, scrubs the floor, airs the mothball smell out of the linens, and topples into bed every night, riding the edge of real exhaustion.

It’s no surprise, then, when he wakes up one morning with an agonizing sore throat. He makes his coffee light and sweet and crawls back into bed with it. The trip into town can wait until afternoon.

But in the afternoon he’s worse, achy and shivering under the blankets. Once he would have struggled out of bed and dosed himself up with pills, desperate to fight his own weakness, but he has less to prove now, and the fever is so familiar. There is a comfort in giving in. He only gets up to pile wood onto the fire, teeth chattering; his rising temperature is a sick satisfaction.

Sunlight crawls across the cabin as the day closes, and Will’s mind roams uneasily, freed from the boundaries his hibernation has maintained. He tries to focus on the expression on Alana’s face when she walked over to him and cupped his face in her hand. That tenderness. “You’re warm,” she’d said, worried. He should have said take me home, stay with me, don’t let go. He should have said please.

But Alana keeps falling away from him—he keeps seeing her gasping on the concrete—and as he skirts delirium he sees Hannibal, or he feels his presence. His warm, steady friend. Hannibal made him soup once, in the hospital. “You made me chicken soup,” Will had said, pleased, disbelieving, making fun of him just a bit; and Hannibal had made that funny little gruff expression and turned away. In embarrassment? Did Hannibal get embarrassed? The soup was delicious. And Hannibal had washed his knuckles so gently—if Will’s careful he can remember just that part, not before or after—the precision of his hands, the calm of his silence.

It’s not that he forgets what really happened, as he drifts, but what clings to him through the fever haze is not the truth of Hannibal Lecter, only that feeling of warm expectation, of fondness, that went with the thought of Hannibal for so long. It was the last thing he expected to find in the BAU; and for so many months, the only comfort in the daily assault of his sleepless, dissolving dreams.

There’s never been any escape from the dark eddy of Hannibal’s influence, not since that first afternoon in Jack’s office. There is no away, there is no free. All of this is some kind of peaceful, dead-wind limbo where he is being allowed to wait out the days. When the time comes, Hannibal will find him.

Let it be soon, he prays, through the roil of his sickness. Why burn more wood? Why make more tracks? Let it be now.

When he sleeps, Hannibal stays with him all night, hiding where the shadows move.

The fever is worse the next day, and he vomits up his toast and coffee, but in the afternoon he manages some crackers and tylenol and sleeps again, dreamlessly this time. It’s dark when he wakes, disoriented and dry-mouthed, bladder aching.

The bathroom mirror reveals that he looks like shit. No surprise there. Sparks are swimming at the edge of his vision, more and more of them, and he realizes dimly that he had better lie down again. They swarm bright and dark, then dark and dark, and he only makes it halfway back to bed before he crumples down into the nothingness.

Time passes, or doesn’t. At some point he blinks into consciousness. His body filters back to coherence slowly—his arm is uncomfortably folded under his chest. It’s cold. He can see his bedside clock from here, glowing steady green, but his vision is too blurred to read it.

It takes all of his limited concentration to sit up and lean against the bed. There’s a can of Sprite on the bedside table. Half full; mostly flat. A weird contentment steals over him. It’s kind of funny, after all. His life has contracted into an infinitesimal size, just him and this scratchy rug. No one knows where he is. No one will help him.

He smiles, baring his teeth. The Sprite’s pretty good.

***

Winter begins turning to spring, and the snow starts to melt. The sound of it is everywhere, trickles running unseen under the snowbanks. Every day he’s a little less sick, but he feels cracked open, somehow. He can’t stop dreaming of old cases, dead bodies, triggers pulled again and again—the usual parade of corpses and screams.

But waking up in a cold sweat is routine, at this point: towel off, bank the fire, crawl back into bed. It’s comforting, or comforting enough.

One morning it’s the image of Beth LeBeau’s face that wakes him, her scored-open fish-belly smile. After all this time, he still feels like he did it—which: he didn’t, he’s not confused any more, he knows that. If anything, that case was a success for him. He was actually helping Georgia, doing something _good_ , for once, he thinks, staring defensively across the room, as though there were anyone to prove it to. Not that his good intentions counted for anything, once he led Hannibal straight to the mark.

Still. No matter how much he’s responsible for, he didn’t hurt Beth. But his nightmare has brought back all the horror of that hallucination: the calm of cleaning the fish, hands steady with long habit, turning slowly to unease as the gorge rose in his throat and he began to sense the real, lifeless young woman beneath him. He fairly throws himself out of bed.

The fishing season will open in a few weeks: April 26 is a date emblazoned on his memory, and historically, a happy one. But the last time he went out was when he caught Hannibal those trout for dinner, and he’s worked hard to avoid thinking about it since. But today some heady mixture of defiance and self-loathing, or maybe just the hopeful light, pushes him out the door to the DNR.

“You want to do a combo hunting/fishing license, hon?” the clerk asks. She doesn’t look much like Beth—square jaw, pert nose—but she’s slim and brown-haired, and he’d really rather not be near her.

“Just fishing,” he says, tensing up. The fluorescent lights vibrate nauseously above him.

“It’s a real good deal now,” she tells him, peppily, but he already said no. It’s not clear why they have to keep talking about it.

The counter is made of some cheap laminate that feels greasy under his forearms; he stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I’m not interested.”

But she’s only just getting into her spiel. “We just rolled out some changes this spring, why don’t I get you a flyer on the license restructuring—”

“I said no.” His voice is too loud. He clenches his jaw shut, holding himself in place. “I don’t hunt.” He sees the moment when it occurs to her finally—finally—to be wary of him. She tucks her hair behind her ear nervously and darts to the back for his forms.

In the parking lot he’s watery-kneed, shaking with rage. _Hunting and fishing, they’re the same, aren’t they? One you stalk and one you lure._ A vision of the clerk’s cut-up corpse flashes through his mind, and he gags, leaning against the sun-warm side of his car.

A handle of Evan Williams is only eighteen ninety-five up here. It tastes just like it used to, snuck from the cupboard when his dad wasn’t home.

***

That night he dreams about Abigail. It isn’t a nightmare.

For months the only thing he could imagine salvaging from their lives was her future: a future where she got to grow up and be free—that’s how he thought of it—free and clear, clean of violence, and the only way to imagine this to himself was to think of her washed in golden afternoon light—golden light and blue shadow—and this is the dream: he’s walking up a grassy knoll in the freshness of late spring, and as he crests the hill, they’re waiting for him. Abigail and Hannibal. And they’re happy, and she’s laughing, shouting at him to hurry up, and woods and fields spread out ahead of them gilded, all the way to the blue mountains in the east.

The patter of drizzle wakes him. The buttery warmth of the dream drains away as chill gray light filters in, and with a sickening jerk he remembers all over again that she’s dead. He rubs his face, feeling cold and raw.

The tumbler by his bed has a finger still left in it. He knocks it back.

He grieved her already, is the thing—there were days in prison when he’d swear it was the only thing keeping him alive. This grief already has a shape and an edge and and a well-worn pain, and it has a purpose: bringing down Hannibal Lecter.

Why should any of it be different now? Abigail is dead, Hannibal killed her, Will didn’t stop it. Those are the only facts that matter. Move the period of that sentence forward three months and here he still is, in the white space with its awful roar. But when he thinks about those dinners he had at Hannibal’s, the two of them smirking and flirting and circling each other, their sick dance of death, and she must have been _in the house_ —

What he should be doing is chasing Hannibal down and exacting some measure of justice, or at least revenge. It’s what he swore to do. But if it was a binding oath, it belongs to a dead man. What’s left of him doesn’t have enough substance to bind to, as he shuffles through this quiet purgatory—he’s just memories and visions, vivid in the mist.

He is scrupulous about his drunkenness that day, and goes to some trouble over it, methodically refilling his glass. It’s not that he thinks it will help, but at least it makes the ghosts a little watery and indistinct. Or the ghosts are real, but he can fade, for a while.

Slumping into bed as the room spins, he’s too far gone to pretend he doesn’t want to have that dream again. Just that comfort: he’d sell his soul for it.

He dreams of Abigail again, all right, but instead of peace he gets one of those sickly, interminable drunk dreams, that winds through the night like a choking vine. The snowmelt trickling down the gutters dribbles through his brain and he dreams of the river, overflowing its banks, treacherously cold and fast. She was trying to tell him something—she was trying to say something important—but the water roared and now she’s gone and he can’t remember whether he told her to stay away from the river.

He wakes up cotton-mouthed and stinking, confused by the late-morning sun, and he’s halfway to adding a slug of bourbon to his coffee when he notices that the heel of his hand is throbbing. A closer look reveals an angry burn that he only barely remembers getting from the wood stove. Christ.

Enough time spent around shrinks will teach anyone the snippy vocabulary for this kind of thing, and it’s “avoidance coping,” sure—but everyone would do better to avoid him, himself included. He’d looked at that woman in the DNR and tasted bitter meat. His stomach lurches.

This is, he knows, what vengeance has bought him. It had felt so good to finally use the power humming inside of him, instead of running from it. He’d spent his whole life trying to box up and tamp down and lock away his mind, with its terrible understanding and dark obsessions, and he’d been so busy trying to straitjacket himself that it had never fully dawned on him that the ability to understand was only the flip side of the ability to control. And when grief burned away all his timid scruples, there his mind was, ready and waiting, as though he’d never tried to disown it, and the rush of power that came with laying his traps had brought him an ease he’d never felt before.

From that first roar of acceleration, he’d plunged deeper and deeper into evil and ruin. There was a brutal inevitability to it: to catch Hannibal he had to be close to him, but to be close to Hannibal was to be warped, like green wood in an overheated kiln. The costs were acceptable, as long as he succeeded—he told himself that—and all the while, the pleasure of it drew him on. It felt good, hunting Hannibal—hunting with Hannibal. Power made him feel real. He had a purpose; it made him whole. So he thought.

The image flashes through his mind again, of the DNR clerk tucking back her hair, suddenly afraid. Shame is thick between his teeth. It was supposed to be safe, here, this is as far away as he knows how to be—that was the whole point. He thought he couldn’t be dangerous if he could just be alone.

But alone, he drifts. He’s an unstable terrain, a formless weather; plumes of violence erupt from him with no warning. He’s just a medium for the past to crash itself against the present, casualties be damned. He bangs his fist on his thigh, throat tight.

The cabin is rank with flop sweat and dirty clothes, and suddenly he can’t take it for another minute. He grabs his coat and shoves his feet into his boots.

There are still a few drifts of snow glinting on the ground in the forest, and his trails are overgrown, but the blazes stand out clearly on the gray trunks. He crouches to tie his shoes. When he looks up, the sunbeams are slanting down to illuminate the tentative greenery, and the cold air is soft with the promise of spring, and it hits him: here is no nightmare, no prison daydream, but the real forest, reaching out to him.

Tears well up in his eyes—there’s so much here that he couldn’t keep with him in Chilton’s cell—and then he thinks of the dogs, bounding over the rolling hills, bowing and barking, and his tears choke in his throat. It’s not one memory, one day, it’s something he feels with his whole body: how they came to learn every ridge and gully of this place with their feet, carving the land into themselves, or themselves into the land, leaving behind these ghosts still playing chase in the woods.

***

Riehl’s is the same as it ever was, with its ancient wood paneling and racks of shiny gear. Will nods at Daniel when he walks in, but Daniel’s restocking and doesn’t see him, so he gets to work rebuilding his fly box. He’s put together a decent set of his favorite nymphs and dries, and is idly considering a garish monstrosity when Joyce comes over with a box of reels in one arm and gives him a hug with the other.

“Look who made it up for the start of the season! How’s it going?”

“Hi, Joyce,” Will says, trying a smile. His voice feels rusty. “Looking forward to getting on the river.”

“Well, of course,” Joyce says, “of course you are. Hey, you’re looking like a million bucks.” Will flushes with embarrassment. His parka was damp so he’d grabbed one of his new coats, the lambswool, with the stand collar. It’s—nice. Warm.

He scrambles for a change of subject. “Now, what kind of tourist trap are you turning this place into?” he asks, holding up a would-be Woolly Bugger. Neon green with purple stripes. It’s the worst thing Will has seen all week.

Joyce snorts at that, waving him off cheerfully. “You know how many of those I sell to guys trying to get their kids to come out with them? I’m trying to make a living here, Herr Professor. But what are you doing by the pre-mades? I’ve got some new, really top-notch partridge just came in.”

“I—don’t have my kit with me this trip. It’s a long story.” The FBI gave him back most of his stuff, but not his tying gear. It hadn’t occurred to him to feel much about that one way or another, before now, but Joyce’s open expression falters and Will feels a stab of unhappiness.

She presses on. “How do you think our chances are for getting that advanced fly-tying class out of you this summer?”

“Joyce,” Daniel says, coming over. “I don’t think that’s the kind of attraction we want.” He shoots Will a dirty look.

Oh. Of course. “World’s most notorious fly-fishing enthusiast?” he asks bitterly. “Yeah, I drove up to the back woods of the UP with a barely-healed stab wound because I just love the attention.” He’s trying to be an asshole, but his voice is wavering oddly. Daniel looks uncomfortable. Good.

“Let me ring you up,” Joyce says, a hand on his arm.

***

On April 26 he sets out at dawn for the best spot on his land, where a tributary of the Carp runs, thinking about Beverly.

She’d given him a hard time, once, about how his only publication was on time of death by insect activity, instead of his “real” talents. “You don’t want to share the love with the rest of us?” she’d asked.

He’d looked at her flatly, a headache pounding behind his eyes. “You don’t want this love,” he’d said, and she’d dimpled at him in that infuriatingly cute way that she had whenever he was being a dickhead.

God, he misses her.

He takes a deep breath and forces himself to focus on the landscape around him: the gold-foil gleam of sunrise in the clouds, the birds singing, the insects low on the water.

What he hadn’t gotten to tell her was that it makes perfect sense for him to have studied insects. Insects are the business of fishermen. Even the most junior fly fisherman knows the life cycle of the caddis and the mayfly. He remembers being barely five years old and finding caddis larva cases by the banks while his dad fished. Delicate and beautiful, made of grains of sand a single layer thick. When he found one, he would pick it up so carefully he’d almost be holding his breath, and swathes of time would slip by as he tried to understand each individual grain of red and brown and gray.

To design a fly, you have to cast yourself out to the hungry fish, scanning the shadow and dazzle of the surface from below: what does it make of its prey? What shape and color and pattern of motion does it expect, given the season? There are some basic guidelines, but real competence, real connoisseurship, comes through long practice. Reckoning with the desires and visions of an alien consciousness drags you down into a different mode of thought, one that brings you swirling down the currents of the river, clarity coming in bright flashes. And meanwhile the real insects buzz along, making their small instinctive circles, eaten or not eaten, all part of the great hum of the world.

He realizes with a lurch that in his mind, he’s explaining this for Abigail.

The thought chills him, and his convulsive grip on the rod scares away a trout. It’s cruel, the way these things still lurk in his imagination. They wait in hidden wells, sheltered from the rough current of the present. That someday she’ll come out to the river with him; that she’ll smile at him. Forgive him. He believes all of these things. They live as far from the surface as blind cave fish and wait for him to lose his way.

That is one of his powers, after all: to inhabit a thought so completely that it becomes a place to live. It’s tempting to let himself stay there, in the fantasy that someday he could teach her what he knows about fishing. It would be so comforting to dwell in the possibility of her, shield himself in it, until every real moment is softened by the armature of daydream he holds in reserve. A gentler insanity than his usual.

That sounds good, actually. Just give up on trying to face facts, for a little while. What the hell, right? There are no consequences for what he thinks, alone out here under the mild spring sky. He wiggles his toes in his waders.

She’d be safe, first of all; and happy, second; and doing something normal. Going to college—and they would fix it, somehow, the money, and the notoriety, Alana would be relentless on the phone with anyone she could think of, so that Abigail could be safe from the questions and the looks. Studying something practical. Alana would try to get her to study—probably not psych, but art or literature or something—and Abigail would give one of her devastating snotty eyebrow raises and say, “I spend enough time thinking about feelings in therapy, I’m going to make _money_.”

So she could come up here on a break and he’d teach her how to fish. No hunting, just the huge rushing peace of the water. Everything seems bearable, on the water. She needs that. Or she would need that, if she weren’t—

No. Focus. Spring break; fishing in the morning; she’d make him watch movies on her laptop and sigh about the lack of cell service. S’mores and pointing out birds to her in the early morning and her grumpy, indulgent face—

And—if he’s getting what he wants, he might as well go whole hog. A crime-free Hannibal, he can imagine that, sort of—although it’s impossible to imagine any version of Hannibal enjoying such rusticated accommodations; so a change of venue is in order. He would plan it all; there’s no version of Hannibal that is not an inveterate control freak. But Will would still get his fishing, and Abigail would probably get her 4G connection, and they would all get to share the quiet camaraderie of people who have lived through the same thing. Hannibal would make dinner and crack very dry jokes and Will would get to keep the best friend he’s ever had.

But the perfection of it starts to bring reality seeping back in: why, after all, not? They could have been part of his life, the strange makeshift family of the three of them, three orphans—he pushes down the voice in his head that wants to bring up all the ways it would never have worked and thinks fiercely that at least they could have tried. And instead Hannibal cut her throat like a sulky child throwing away a toy.

There was no reason, Hannibal loved her as much as he did, there was no reason she couldn’t be alive now. But Hannibal couldn’t have everything exactly the way he wanted it, and somehow that was good enough?

And oh, there it is: fury. He hasn’t felt anger like this since before he was gutted. It boils along now like floodwater, carrying him away. People were just tools to Hannibal. Lower beings. He loved Abigail but the instant she was inconvenient to him, that was it. And for all his talk of Achilles and Patroclus, love and friendship—and Will never stopped believing it, no matter how well he knew better—in the end Hannibal looked at him and saw nothing but an ill-trained dog.

It’s a relief to be angry, sort of, because it’s the only thing that can temper the shame. It settles in like a front. He goes to the river angry; he walks home angry. It makes the sunlight sharper and the fresh air warmer, bearing down on every moment. He loses track of time in the shower rehearsing arguments he’ll never get to use. One day the water turns icy and he almost falls down in surprise.

The hub of the argument is always the same: she didn’t have to die.

It’s not that he doesn’t understand Hannibal’s logic, because oh, he does. It’s all his own fault, actually—or that’s what Hannibal believes, and a large portion of his arguments are with the voice in his head that believes it too. Because, after all, how was Hannibal supposed to take her on the lam with him after Will betrayed them? How was any of it supposed to continue? It was Will who destroyed their family, Will who made the first blow: on some level, this makes perfect sense to him. The stomach-churning unease of plotting Hannibal’s downfall feels, in these moments, like unbearable guilt. He has to construct and reconstruct elaborate rebuttals just to fix in his mind that under no circumstances was he the one who started it.

But neither was he a passive victim. He can’t let himself forget that. Racing along in Hannibal’s wake, trying to be so fucking clever, fooling himself that he was even half in control. At least Hannibal was only ever acting true to his nature. There’s a purity to Hannibal: he is all one thing, from tip to toe, perfectly formed and perfectly confident—and the damage he causes is perfectly intentional. No stab wound is a quarter of an inch deeper than it needs to be.

Will doesn’t flatter himself that he’s an innately evil person. But that’s just the trouble. What is he? He’s not quite solid, and that formlessness makes him too dangerous to live out in the world, where anyone could become collateral.

He had waited with a fisherman’s patience to catch Hannibal. He had fashioned himself into the bait and cast himself out on a weightless line across the water. And he was the one left gutted and gasping in the kitchen. Saving no one.

He tosses the fish back when he catches them, and the birds sing earlier every morning for the warming days.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Winston is not actually a good dog,” she says, “he just loves you.”
> 
> Will runs his fingers through the soft fur behind Winston’s ears. “Hm,” he says.

He’s eating Cheerios for dinner one evening, wandering restlessly around the cabin, when he hears something. He thinks it must be wind, or rain, before he realizes that the sky is clear and there’s someone coming up the gravel drive. The chimney guy? He was the last person besides Will to make the drive out here.

The chimney guy does not drive a hybrid sedan. Will recognizes the car without knowing why, and he feels for a moment like he’s in a dream. Dreams are where matter comes unstuck from time and consequence. Things don't make sense in dreams. People can be—

The screen door whaps shut behind him, reassuringly real. Dark head, blue dress—he hears barking—

She turns her head to smile at him, just for a second, slamming the driver's door, and goes to the passenger seat. Applesauce bounds out, all excitement and happy twitching nose—and then—

“Who’s my buddy,” Will says, at random, through an armful of almost berserkly happy dog. “Who’s my friend?” He’s sitting down, now, somehow, and it’s a tactical error: too many kisses. Will play-barks at him and Winston sits back on his haunches, startled; then enormously pleased.

“His ears are so fluffy,” Will says to Alana, idiotically. “I forgot.”

“He didn't throw up in the car even once,” she says back.

The car. “How did you get here?” Will asks, pushing up to his feet. “—Is he back?”

Alana knows which to answer first. “He’s not back. There’s no case.” She walks over to him and he finally notices she's moving slowly, leaning on a cane. Every achy, hitching step hurts to watch. He wants to tell her to get lost.

She faces him squarely, as steady as ever. “I brought you your dog, Will. Let’s have dinner.”

She brought dinner with her, grocery store rotisserie chicken and salad and a loaf of bread. Considerate to a fault. To the point of condescension, he thinks peevishly. He doesn’t live out in the middle of nowhere without being able to feed himself—he was going to make red beans and rice, blackened trout—he gives himself a good shake and lets Winston distract him for a minute. Whatever Alana’s doing here, he can’t not be glad to see her. When he left, no one had known, yet, how she would be.

How she is is bossy. She’s rummaging through his cupboards and setting out plates and forks before he can so much as get Winston to sit down.

He goes to the fridge for a couple Heinekens. “Sit,” he says, pressing one on her, and sets the table himself. Now that she’s still, she looks small, and he sees the new lines etched in her face.

“L’chaim,” she says, lifting her drink; he toasts her back and takes a long pull, not as ironically as he could have.

“You didn’t answer my question, before.” He slides that challenge out in a light, friendly tone. “How did you find me here?” He’d taken pains to keep this place private. The address isn’t on any of his employment paperwork. He’d never even told Hannibal about it, out of some deep subconscious instinct. Still, with her Bureau contacts, there are a few different ways she could have found it, and he’s curious to see which one she’ll cop to.

He’s rewarded with her very faint look of embarrassment. “Do you remember when you gave me comments on my journal article? You posted the redline from up here, at the beginning of the summer.”

In fact, he’d had a serious internal debate that summer about whether to finish the edit before he left for Michigan, in order to avoid this exact possibility. But he’d needed more time to do justice to her article, and the nervous flutter he felt when he imagined her knowing about his little cabin hadn’t been entirely unpleasant. He vividly remembers dropping the envelope off at the post office, with its dry comments and brief note—but she doesn’t have to know that.

“That would have only had my PO box number on it,” he points out.

“I had to ask around in town.”

“Oh? Who’d you talk to?” He starts dressing the salad.

“I figured if you were a regular anywhere, it would be at the fly-fishing store. Detective work really isn’t that hard, you know.” She lets him fill her plate. “Joyce certainly seems to like you.”

“I’ve known Joyce and Daniel for a long time,” he says, neutrally. He’d like to know exactly how she got that impression, but he’d rather not ask.

“I didn’t realize that this was your father’s place,” she says. He almost smiles, to be playing this game again with an able partner, each of them working to scope out the other.

He gives her some freebie insights about coming up here with his dad, and they let their conversation lapse in favor of dinner. He chews over what he’s seen so far: she would have told him outright if there were an urgent case, but that doesn’t mean she’s not on some kind of mission. Alana always could spend a long time avoiding the topic if she thought she needed to “build trust.”

Will can really only imagine two reasons she might be up here: get him to go back to work, or get him to go back to therapy. Knowing Alana, he’d guess the latter, but knowing Alana, he would have said she wouldn’t come at all. Moving away and cutting off all contact was a pretty clear statement of his wishes. Still, all he really has to find out is how many times he’ll have to say no before she gives up on the idea.

Smart of her to bring Winston. He can’t help but be glad, no matter how transparent the manipulation. But why Applesauce, too? Surely she could have gotten a sitter, and only had to wrangle one dog through a cross-country car ride. Especially with the way she’s limping. She can’t have been out of rehab long.

He studies her in between bites. She’s trudging through the food on her plate dutifully, but without much real hunger, and the tension in her shoulders seems like the only thing keeping her upright. But she’s stopped sizing him up in return. Whatever she’s thinking about, it’s not him.

He’s almost done eating before she comes out of her reverie. “My motives for coming up here weren’t entirely disinterested,” she begins, with a self-deprecating air of confession. “I was hoping to ask you for a favor.”

“What is it?”

“Well, my manuscript is due this fall, and what with—everything—you can imagine I’m a little behind where I want to be.” She gives a little laugh, studiously light. “I was wondering if I could stay for a little while and see if I can churn out the next round of edits. —Only if you don’t mind the company, I’m happy to just let you and Winston get on with things.”

“No—” It comes out before he thinks about it. “Company would be alright.” His traitor mouth. This has bad idea written all over it. “Not like you to turn up unannounced,” he adds, mostly to feel like he’s not losing this encounter so badly.

She gives him a look. “I left you two voicemails last week.”

Oh. He hasn’t checked his phone since, well, sometime last week. Possibly the week before.

Some part of him is suggesting that he had better get rid of her, sooner rather than later, but then he thinks about the last time he saw her, before that bad night—the palpable effort it had taken her to keep her composure. She’d apologized to him then, once, for not believing him, but he’d been too stony with rage in those weeks for much to reach him. Now he thinks about the shadows in her eyes and puts a pot of milk on the range to heat.

They drink cocoa on the porch while the dogs snarfle up their own dinner. When the fireflies come out, the dogs, delighted, take advantage of the long northern twilight to chase them around the yard.

“Jack’s alive,” Alana says, “I don’t know if you heard.”

“I didn’t know,” he says. “That’s good.” The air is cooling now, as the light fades from blue to deep gray, and he wraps his hands around his mug.

Alana leans forward and scoops the air, then sits back, a firefly blinking in her palm.

***

The next day he sets out for the river at dawn, which is sort of a dirty trick, but he can’t bear the thought of being in the house with her all day. He leaves a note, anyway. There’s food in the fridge. She’ll be fine.

Dawn, his favorite time of day, when day-sleepers are still ambling to bed and night-sleepers have just rustled awake. He’s most of the way along the trail to the river, eyes up on the treetops scanning for birds, when he nearly trips on a black-and-white lump that trundles out right in front of him. A skunk—he stumbles back, biting off a swear.

It pauses, checking him over with one myopic eye. Will holds his breath. Getting sprayed is not in his plans for the day.

He must pass muster, because after a long moment it noses under the next bush, on its way home to bed. With the leftovers of the adrenaline spike warming his limbs, he feels a sudden tenderness for it—its grumpy, blunt manners, the fact that it’s surely heading home now, to curl up in its den of fallen leaves and snooze away the heat of the day.

His thoughts drift back to his own home, where Alana is curled up, dreaming long, unknown dreams. Just the fact of her, breathing the shallow breaths of sleep, inside his own house—it gives him a strange feeling.

He’d be lying if he said he’d never fantasized about this—not _this_ , exactly, but Alana coming up here to visit him. It had been a favorite, if slightly abashed, daydream in summers past, its many variations attempting to solve the small problem of its impossibility. Sometimes he’d offer refuge from minor personal disasters—her house being fumigated, her boyfriend (did she have one?) jilting her—which made him feel obscurely dirty; and sometimes he’d woo her into vacationing with him through some yet-unknown reserve of charm, which made him feel ridiculous, and sad.

But his favorite was the one where she’d come to get some work done on her book, away from all the distractions. The Alana who’d smile in surprise and say “you know, I might just take you up on that” seemed the most like the Alana he knew: sensible, cheerful, put together. And if she had a project she wouldn’t be bored, and it would be a good thing that he lived in the ass end of nowhere, and when she wanted a break he could take her out hiking to his favorite spots—and one evening he might sit next to her under the blanket, and lean in, and kiss her, and—

Well. It’s all moot now. Even that sad little fantasy is just another punchline in the sick joke his life keeps telling. He could never have imagined that she really would come here and it would be like this.

Which raises the question, doesn’t it, of what this is. Her explanation was so determinedly normal that it managed to leave out almost every real thing about their lives. There’s enough betrayal and loss between them to stock a Russian novel—but this is just some kind of professional sabbatical?

One thing is clear: she is going back to her real life, her Georgetown job and her book contract and her sterling academic career, come hell or high water. He, on the other hand—well, here he is. For years he’d managed to keep up something that could pass for a career at the FBI, even if some of the individual decisions that kept him on the staff had more to do with prurient curiosity and pity than the worth of his yearly teaching load. But now, in the bloody wreckage of this year, he has to be grateful simply that the Bureau’s desire to see it all go away has permitted him to escape without prosecution.

Alana probably has any number of professional colleagues with secluded and attractive second homes upon whom she could have prevailed for her little writer’s retreat. She didn’t have to invite herself up here; and even if she were determined, through some stubborn do-gooder desire, to bring Winston back to him, that’s no reason to stay. The home of the disgraced half-mad former pet project of your serial killer ex-boyfriend, who’s been blatantly carrying a torch for you for about three years: not an obvious vacation pick. What does she want from him?

For that matter, who does she even think he is? Her assessments have … varied, over time.

The river is running high today after last week’s rain. Will wades into a promising run and lifts up a rock to see what the bugs look like today.

He has surprisingly good luck and gets a gorgeous steelhead for dinner by eight, but it’s hours yet and the sun beating down before he can bring himself to pack up.

At home he’s almost ready to clean the fish when Alana comes out. She leans against the porch post, arms crossed. Her face is in a swath of shade that dapples down her legs. Without looking straight at her he can feel her there at the corner of his eye, the scene like a painting, almost too pretty to be real.

The Alana Bloom of years past would immediately have begun outlining her reasons for interrupting him, her own perspective, and the steps required to finish their interaction, all so smoothly that it was easy not to realize she was doing it. She had a feline fastidiousness about space: that hers might be brought only so near to his, and no nearer.

Today she is quiet, and does not apologize, and watches him. And he lets her.

With her eyes on him, his preparations take on an almost ritualistic quality. The table covered with newsprint, the bucket set out to his left, the cooler waiting patiently. He makes himself pull out his knife. It’s new, black-handled and gleaming. He’d used his dad’s old knife for so long that the blade had become nearly concave from decades of sharpening; this one he finally bought at the end of last summer. An indulgence.

In the cooler, the fish is almost as rosy-glossed as it was when he caught it. He lays it on the table, brushing away a few slivers of ice, and looks at it mutely. He wants to say that he’s been cleaning fish practically since he could walk. Instead he picks up the knife.

He’s done this a thousand times but he’d be a liar if he didn’t admit that there’s a new dark thrum underneath it. He takes the head off efficiently and swerves under a roar of memories: his own hands, his father’s hands, doing this same job—and of course Hannibal’s there, like a dissonant note in the chord, Hannibal’s hands wielding that big knife. So fetishistically precise.

Alana can see Hannibal in him, he knows. Will fairly reeks of him. He’s imitating him in every motion, almost consciously, out of sheer perverseness, and he can’t seem to stop. He whacks off the tail and bares his teeth at the fish, gutting it with a surgical notch and drag.

Alana’s standing up straighter now, arms falling to her sides. Splot go the guts in the bucket. He gets to work filleting the flesh off the bones with the same vicious ease, resolutely not watching her.

When he’s done he wraps the meat in butcher’s paper, neat as you please, and presents it with a flourish. “Ta-da,” he says.

“Will,” she says, frowning, and he’s lightheaded with anger at the fear in her eyes.

“I’m the poor man’s version of him, everyone knows that,” he spits. “Or the poor woman’s—I understand you have a vacancy. Maybe you’re interested now, what d’you say? He cut up my guts, but my dick still works.”

He’s glad to watch all the emotion drain from her face, but then he notices how thin and gray she is. “How dare you,” she says, which is pathetic, but she sounds so lost. She goes into the house, emerging in a moment with her purse, and walks out past him to her car, head down.

As she drives away he laughs a little, weirdly, to himself. It’s funny that she’s gone again, like a movie that’s stopped in the wrong place. When he can’t hear her car any more he imagines the peace of having the cabin to himself again. And feels like he swallowed a cold stone.

“Fuck,” he says. He starts cleaning up as shame oozes through him from the belly out.

Barking from inside rouses him from his self-recrimination, and he goes in to see what the trouble is.

Winston and Applesauce are play-fighting in the cramped space, and as soon as he comes in they spring over to him, wagging. Applesauce rolls over and grins, upside-down.

Will’s so relieved he doesn’t even care what an incredibly dumb mistake that was. She’s coming back.

“Good girl,” he tells Saucy, rubbing her tummy.

***

Alana doesn’t come back until early evening, and Will is in the kitchen, making dinner. That is to say, he’s anxiously moving things around in the kitchen, wondering if Alana will be back in time for dinner. When he hears her car he heads out onto the porch, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Hi,” she says.

“Take two,” he says, like a dumbass. He looks at his favorite tree, over her shoulder. He’s trying to say he’s sorry but it’s sticking in his teeth.

She nods a little anyway, preoccupied with her own words. “It was naïve of me,” she says carefully, “to think we had an under—to think I could come here and—” she swallows. “To think that you would not be angry. With me. I didn’t think I had any naïveté left.”

“I thought you’d gone,” he blurts. That gets her attention. He lets those watchful eyes investigate him to see how he means it. He’s not sure himself.

“I would have taken my dog,” she says mildly.

“No, I know, I—realized.” He’s stepped closer to her at some point, and they’re only an arms-length apart. It’s obvious she’s been crying. “I made dinner,” he says, pulling away.

The red beans and rice are almost ready, and it only takes him a few minutes to prep the fish and start frying it up. They serve themselves from the stove and Will paces around the cabin with his bowl, still twitchy with discomfort. He finally settles outside, on the porch steps.

After a few minutes, Alana comes out and sits beside him. They eat in silence together. It’s a little overcooked.

“Hannibal never made me dinner to apologize,” she says, pushing her rice around. “Food was only one thing to him. You know?”

“Yeah,” Will says, “people.”

She’s silent and for a second he thinks he’s ruined it again, but she huffs something between a laugh and a sigh.

“Sorry,” he says, “it’s not really funny.”

“It’s really not,” she says. “But I mean it,” she insists, “food was always a display with him. Of control. Control of the flavor, the presentation, control over—life and death. And control of the guests.”

“He thought it was an honor.” Will’s heart rate is speeding up. “To be invited into his kingdom.”

“He didn’t know the difference between kindness and control,” Alana says. “Doesn’t.”

Will has to close his eyes against the dark rush in his head. Doesn’t. He manages a tiny nod.

“Will,” she says gently, “what I’m saying is, you’re not like him. Not really. Just because you can cook meat doesn’t make you the same.”

He wants to cry, but he doesn’t want to do it in front of her. He turns away and tries to get his breathing under control. Alana is very still.

“Why did you come here?” he asks, digging his thumbnail into the grain of the wood steps.

That makes her pause for long enough that he finally glances up at her. “I woke up,” she says, finally, “and no one knew where you were.” Her eyes are sad.

He fidgets. “I’m sorry for what I said to you,” he says. “It was—rude.”

“It was very rude,” she agrees, standing up. “Thank you for the apology.”

The rest of the evening is strangely peaceful. Will does the dishes and then spends some time cleaning and reorganizing his gear; Alana curls up on the couch with a book.

Applesauce has been nipping at Winston’s butt, hoping to play, and he’s obviously about to pick a fight over having been woken up, so Alana scoots down onto the rug and tussles with her instead. When Saucy gets worn out, they snuggle up together on the floor.

Winston is lying curled around Will’s feet, but he thumps his tail for Alana when she looks over at him.

“The others got adopted out,” she says, not looking up at Will. “All great homes, they swore up and down. And I—checked.”

“Winston couldn’t get adopted?” he asks, mock-offended, and maybe a little bit real offended.

“Winston is not actually a good dog,” she says, “he just loves you.”

Will runs his fingers through the soft fur behind Winston’s ears. “Hm,” he says.

***

After that, things get very quiet between them, which he supposes is her settling in. He sleeps in the main room, so she’s staying in what is technically the bedroom and sleeping on the old pullout bed. He’s relieved to be able to offer her at least that much privacy.

He’s not eager to go fishing again in a hurry, but he finds other chores to do that take him out at first light. The first day, when he comes home for lunch, she’s working at the dining table with papers spread all around, and they do an awkward little two-step of politeness: she apologizes; he demurs; she rearranges her things onto the coffee table regardless. He hangs around a little once he finishes eating, thinking that she might want to share her progress, but she slips out to the porch while he’s in the bathroom, closing the front door behind her. The next day he packs a lunch to take with him.

The only time they regularly spend together is at dinner—he keeps on making the resolutely homey bayou food he ate with his dad, but she doesn’t turn up her nose. Will keeps expecting her to set her fork down and start telling him how to fix his life in her best therapist voice—and she seems on the verge of it a couple times, looking at him like she’s got something to say—but days go by and no talk. They don’t talk about much, besides the weather. Mostly they talk to the dogs.

He keeps waiting for her to talk about Abigail. She still visits his dreams sometimes, and lingers at the edges of his thoughts. Part of him wants to know that Alana is grieving her too. But she doesn’t bring it up, and in return he curls himself tight around the loss like a wound.

It’s not really comfortable, but she's quiet, and neat, and courteous to a fault, and there’s no reason for him to feel so off-balance. And she brought him his dog. She could ask for a much bigger favor than this, in return.

It is—he doesn’t have words for what it is, to have Winston back. He’s glossy and healthy and practically quivering with good cheer, sticking to Will like his own personal speckled burr. Normally he wouldn’t stand for a dog getting underfoot as much as Winston does, but he really can’t bring himself to mind. If Alana notices him getting misty-eyed in the evenings, tracing Winston’s fine eyebrows with his thumb, she doesn’t say.

***

One night he’s dozing restlessly when he happens to hear her getting up out of bed in the other room. A sliver of light appears underneath her door.

There’s a reasonable chance she’ll head to the kitchen for a snack or a glass of water, so he hunkers down and tries to look convincingly unconscious, although now that his ears are fixed on the small noises of her moving around, sleep seems like a distant proposition. He’s been alone for so long that it’s unsettling to hear someone else moving around in his space. She’s pacing, it sounds like, or maybe doing a set of exercises—though the rhythm is more fitful than methodical. He waits for her to either go back to bed or come out, but she doesn’t.

What’s keeping her awake tonight? Bad dreams? His curiosity finally gets the better of him. He switches on his bedside lamp and goes to fix himself some cereal. If she wants company, or just a snack, it’s obvious now that he’s up and won’t be disturbed by her walking past.

She pads out before he’s halfway through the bowl, pulling a pretty silk robe over her pajamas.

“Want some?” he asks, holding up the box.

“Thanks, I’m alright,” she says, filling a glass from the sink. “Can’t sleep?” she asks lightly, leaning against the counter.

It would be too pointed to tell her that she woke him up, and it’s not his own sleeping habits that he’s interested in, anyway. He shrugs. “Sometimes an infusion of Frosted Flakes is necessary to maintain the ecosystem.”

“I must have slept through that lecture in college.” The deep blue of her robe is striking against her skin; trust Alana to look stylish even in the middle of the night. “Do you have trouble sleeping a lot?”

Technically, the answer is yes, but these days he just figures the nightmares into his schedule, and the end result is that he comes out well-rested, as often as not. “I do a lot better now that my brain’s not on fire. What about you? Nightmare?”

She returns him shrug for shrug. “I do a lot better now that my murderous ex-boyfriend is on another continent.”

He jerks his head, half-nod, half-surprise: he’s been guessing as much, but she wouldn’t say it without some confirmation. “But they haven’t tracked him down.”

“The trail went cold in France, but they’re sure he hasn’t come back to the States, anyway. As sure as you can be.”

“He’s too busy sulking over his broken heart,” Will says, lip curling. “He won’t be back for a while.”

“And when do you think he’ll be back?”

“Oh, a year, at least. Realistically, more. Right now he’s furiously pretending that none of this ever happened. That he never got—attached.”

“To you,” she says dryly.

“You either,” he protests, although they both know she’s right. “The deluxe murder spectaculare was reserved for his nearest and dearest.”

She straightens up with a tiny wince, probably at the memory of being pushed out of a window, and gestures vaguely at the cabin around them. “So this is—what, then? Are you getting away or just waiting him out?”

He bites down on his first response, which is _I just didn’t want to die in Virginia_. He thinks about all the dreams he has about Hannibal coming back for him: golden sunlight, happy ending. Sometimes he dies in those dreams. Usually he’s already dead. His silence is starting to be conspicuous. “I—like it up here.”

Her expression softens, at that. “I can see why. It’s beautiful country.”

It _is_ beautiful, as top-notch a bit of woods as you’ll find anywhere. Alana’s never seemed especially outdoorsy, but she’s not blind, either. This place isn’t lost on her. He looks at her properly for the first time, smiling despite himself.

But she looks away. “I should let you get back to bed.” She taps on the counter, businesslike. “You should think about doing some breathing exercises to help you unwind.”

The warmth he was feeling disappears. He squints at her. He didn’t ask for advice, much less Introduction to Mindfulness seminar platitudes. “Is that the kind of insight Georgetown hired you for?”

It comes out sharper than he intended, and the temperature in the room drops all the way to frigid.

“It was just a suggestion. Good night, Will.”

“Good night.”

He washes his bowl in the sink as she shuts her door behind her, feeling vexed. In what possible world could he need instruction in basic stress reduction techniques? Just because he doesn’t have a PhD doesn’t mean he’s not a professional in the same damn field.

Not to mention that _he_ isn’t the one who was having trouble sleeping tonight. He looks at her closed door and blinks. This whole encounter was supposed to be a way for him to shake her down for information, but somehow he’s the only one who gave anything away. It’s been a long time since he’s been sidestepped that neatly. As soon as she threw in that nugget about Hannibal, he lost the thread completely. Well: at least he’s predictable.

But if she’s just here to work on her book, why approach a late night snack like an interrogation? Or, at least, a therapy session. That was her clinical skill set at work. There’s a sour taste in his mouth at the thought.

And of course he had to follow it up by insulting her professional qualifications. Nice.

He curls back up in bed, feeling drained, and this time he determinedly doesn’t listen for the sounds of her bedding down in the other room.

***

At dinner the next day, it’s hard to tell if she’s any chillier than usual. The list of things they avoid talking about at dinner each night is intimidatingly long. The events of the last year are out; her career and book are out; the aimless ruin of his life is out; so is fishing; they even try not to talk about the food. Usually he tries to make himself not-unpleasant for whatever amount of small talk she’s determined to get through, and then lapses with some relief into silence for the rest of the meal. Tonight, though, he keeps sneaking glances at her, trying to read her, and suddenly finds himself embarking on a long anecdote about trying to fix a burst pipe the first time he came up here with his dad.

He feels a twinge of alarm as he gets going—it’s not really Alana’s kind of story, roughly equal parts technical detail and slapstick—but soon he warms to his theme. His dad’s cadences start to come out in his voice, and by the time a four-month-old Zeke has been marooned on the toilet seat, tiny legs splayed across the bowl, she’s laughing outright. By the end she’s snorting in an extremely unladylike fashion, and he smiles back at her helplessly.

“I can’t remember the last time I told that story,” he says, but when he notices her look turn serious, he blushes, and starts clearing the table.

He busies himself in cleaning up, and Alana takes the dogs out for their last excursion. For a while he can hear them barking and laughing as they set off from the house, but soon all he can hear is the breeze and the buzzing insects of summer. It occurs to him that it’s become rare for him to be the only one in the house; not so long ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything but solitude.

When they come back, he can tell that something is wrong. The dogs seem anxious, and Alana is subdued, not cheerful as she usually is when she comes back from a walk. He thinks it’s his fault, but then he sees the bloody smear down her right forearm.

“What happened?” he asks, getting to his feet. “Are you okay?”

“Just clumsy,” she says, mouth twisting. “We had a little adventure. Mr Explorer here saw a porcupine and wasn’t listening when I told him to stay away from it, so I went running after him and tripped.” The dog in question is butting up solicitously against her knees, which are dirty but not bleeding. “But he was so worried about me that he came dashing over and forgot all about his master plan to get a snoutful of quills.”

“Your leg,” he says. She didn’t look like she was limping worse than usual, but a fall like that could have wrenched or torn any number of things.

She looks at him blankly. “My leg’s fine. It wasn’t a big deal.”

He’s none too sure about that. A drop of blood has reached all the way to the inside of her wrist. “That looks nasty.”

She shrugs, starting to turn away. “It’s nothing.”

“Hey.” He catches her wrist gently. “Let me see.” It’s not very deep, but she’s scraped off a wide patch of skin, and there’s an ample quantity of dirt ground in. He has to resist the urge to let his fingertips graze the unhurt skin on the inside of her arm. “Looks like it stings.” The clean washcloths are in the cupboard, but he’ll have to be extra careful to avoid hurting her as he cleans it out.

She pulls her arm back after what he realizes was a long few seconds. “It’s okay,” she says quickly. “I need a shower anyway. I’ll just wash it out and bandage up.”

“Oh—of course,” he says, feeling exposed. He steps back. Maybe she thinks he’s getting some kind of perverted thrill from seeing her hurt—and given his strange pang of disappointment, maybe he is. But she’s a grown woman. She can handle her own scrapes. “First aid kit under the sink.”

While she’s in the shower, he picks up her button-down and looks at the bloody smear at the elbow. It’s jarring against the expensive-casual crispness of the shirt.

She’s not well enough to be throwing herself around the woods, frankly. Not after injuries like hers. If she walked home, it wasn’t nearly as serious as it could have been, but still, it couldn’t have done her rehab any favors. And now she’s just going to shrug him off and act like nothing happened—like it’s intrusive of him to even ask?

He would rather not be thinking about her showering, but he does, intensely, for a moment, about the grit and blood washing away from her skin, about the ache in her bones. He gives himself a shake.

The blood on her shirt is drying to a dark rust color. Bloodstains set quickly, if they’re not treated. As he happens to know. He takes it into the laundry room to distract himself.

It was only a matter of time, he reflects while he scrubs, before the dogs managed to get themselves in trouble. Their off-leash training needs serious improvement if they’re going to spend any time up here, for their own safety, and for Alana’s as well. He’d been meaning to get around to it, but he let it go, and look where it got them.

At least Winston decided not to go after the porcupine, in the end. It’s an hour to the vet’s office, and that would have been a very long night.

The stain has faded to a few light brown spots when he hears her calling for him from the bathroom, loud enough to carry but not urgent. He rushes back into the other room and she’s sticking her head out the bathroom door, looking tentative.

“Will, I’m sorry, could you give me a hand? I can’t get this bandage—”

She’s put her shorts and cami back on, he’s relieved to see, but her bra’s on the floor and the air is humid with the sweet smell of her shampoo. And she herself is damp and slightly pink, hair in wet coils down her back.

“—Just too clumsy with my left hand to tape it up properly,” she’s saying, fast, almost anxiously.

Privately he feels a greedy pleasure that he gets to do this for her after all, but letting on to that definitely won’t make her less nervous. “It’s okay,” he says, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s no trouble.”

He sits her down on the toilet seat and kneels down in front of her, pulling gauze and tape out of the kit. Small wonder she was having trouble doing it left-handed: it’s too long for a single square of gauze, and the worst of it is at her elbow, hard to tape. Looks better now that it’s clean, though.

She already spread a thin coat of Neosporin across most of the wound, and she’s silent as he touches it up. She keeps her arm still with the close-lipped stolidity of the obedient child—scrupulously not recoiling, now, even though he’s only inches away from her freshly-scrubbed and scantily-clad body. He makes his hands as careful as he can to compensate for the thick feeling of his tongue in his mouth.

It doesn’t take him long to bandage her up, but the silence is loud between them as he smooths the medical tape onto her arm. “Should hold through morning,” he says, washing his hands.

When he opens the bathroom door, Winston is right on the other side, waiting to burst in on them. He shoves his head into Alana’s lap, whuffing.

“You still trying to make it up to me, buddy?” she asks, tussling his ears. Winston licks her nose.

“Well, he wants to be good,” Will says. “He just doesn’t know how.”

***

One morning he hauls himself out of bed, shushing the dogs, and feeds them on the porch. He’s been working on clearing the underbrush from the back trails; he grabs his gloves and shears and hustles out.

The mile or so closest to the cabin is pretty clear, but he chooses the west fork away from the river, where the summer’s growth has been making ambitious progress into the main path. The trails rarely get entirely grown over, even when he slacks off, because the deer like them; but comfortable for a deer and comfortable for a person are different things.

It’s slow work, but pleasant enough, despite the occasional brambles. The satisfaction of the clear path behind him buoys his mood, and he falls into the rhythm of pulling back the branches and trimming them neatly at the joins.

Will spends most of the hike out thinking about Winston. Winston’s never been up here before, but he might have the perfect temperament for a fishing dog—smart and playful, but not too high-strung. Admittedly, he has a whole mess of behavioral issues laying on top of that. His last owners had fired a glassy streak of stubbornness into their dog, and turned him into a master at pretending he hadn’t heard you. But they’d made a lot of progress together in the fall, before all the—disruption.

It might have been the only good thing about last fall. He would come home from Quantico or Dulles and there would be a couple hours of quiet time with the dogs, feeding them and playing his twin roles as chief cuddler and primary referee. Winston had been the odd dog out in the pack, but it didn’t take Will long to see that Winston’s attention was skimming the other dogs in favor of a scrupulous focus on him, instead. The more Will gave him, the more steady and responsive he became.

It was good to have a pack. They listened to him, and he listened to them. The best moments had been the ones where, just for a second, he could feel his own power keeping their little home afloat. He knew how to get Buster to eat and Sophie to drop the dead things she would, inevitably, find in the woods; he knew when to head off an aggressive moment, when to add some scritches into the mix.

But as he got sicker, the balance shifted. He was away a lot, and when he wasn’t, headaches made him impatient. They did their best to help him—more than once it was the dogs who wet-nosed him into waking up from a nightmare, standing in front of the kitchen sink, or walking out of the house. But his stress and fear bled into them. They picked fights with each other and barked at shadows. Zeke worry-licked almost all the fur off his tail. And pretty soon Hannibal handed him over to Chilton, and they went to Alana, and god only knows what kind of time she had dealing with them, although she never complained.

Now he grieves the loss of all his friends. He lets himself feel it, for the first time since the hospital: his little family torn up and gone astray—astray again. Everything goes. Now the four of them make an uneasy new assembly.

What he’d liked about being alone in the house—liked is a strong word—but on good days, he forgot he had boundaries at all. He could just be a thought in the swim of the air, set in his little house as in the element he most accords with. He was safe: there was nothing for him to destroy.

But with Alana here, he blunders around, the connection interrupted. She’s always intruding like a pebble in his shoe, a perpetual friction. The mere possibility of her attention rips the invisible scrim of comfort from his things and leaves them staring in the naked light.

He thought it would get easier, once they got used to each other. It hasn’t. On the contrary, since her fall, her courtesy has become more oppressively formal than ever. He can’t so much as hand her a cup of coffee without it feeling like some kind of grand renegotiation of boundaries. So much of the time she seems not to notice him, and then out of nowhere she’ll thank him so gravely that his stomach lurches.

He’s also beginning to suspect that Alana is going to some trouble to hide how much pain she’s in. She’s not shy about taking painkillers in front of him, and they’re only over-the-counter meds, but there’s been something almost too scrupulous about it. Exactly the recommended doses, at intervals no shorter than recommended—and barely a wince of complaint. She’s doing an extremely good impression of someone experiencing a smooth recovery. But what’s that worth?

Since that first late-night skirmish, he hasn’t pried, even though twice he’s jolted awake sure that she had cried out, and heard only silence, so that he was left wondering if his own dream had woken him. Whatever dreams she has or doesn’t have, they’re only more blanks in the list of things they don’t talk about. He almost feels like he’s seeing her through a haze, or from a great distance, so that even her expressions are somehow indistinct.

When he walks into the clearing in front of the house that afternoon, he sees her sitting in one of the porch chairs. Her head is lolling at an odd angle, and her legs are kicked out, lax.

He’s sprinting across the yard before he knows what he’s doing, the bottom dropping out of his stomach, but by the time he gets to the foot of the steps, she’s blinking awake. “Will? Something wrong?”

“Are you okay?” he asks, heart still thudding, as she yawns.

“What? Yeah.” She frowns, scrubbing at her face. “What’s going on?”

“You dropped your book—nothing’s going on, it’s fine,” he says, stooping for the slim hardcover. “Take your book.”

“Were you worried about me?” she asks, a strange look on her face.

“You shouldn’t sleep like that,” he says, banging inside. “It’s bad for your neck.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thought he was extending a simple favor to her, letting her stay here. But it feels less simple all the time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quotes in this chapter come from the poem [Landscape](http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/09/26/landscape-louise-gluck/) from Louise Glück's [Averno](http://www.amazon.com/Averno-Poems-Louise-Gl%C3%BCck/dp/0374530742).

Tomorrow’s grocery day, because all he’s got is some scraggly produce and some meat in the freezer, which means tonight is gumbo. He’s got the roux cooking down on the stove and the sausage browning when he turns around to see two pairs of deeply soulful canine eyes beseeching him.

“They’ve been creeping up on you like a pair of Marines since the second you put the meat in that skillet,” Alana says, from her seat at the table.

Will gives them a stern look. “Absolutely not,” he says. He can see Winston weighing his options, but Will doubles down on his mean face and they slink away. Then he realizes he’s left the roux unattended and hops to.

“They’ve really cleaned up their act since we got here.” Alana’s voice is warm. It’s true: Winston has been rediscovering some of the good manners he forgot, and Saucy has been following suit in her happy-go-lucky way. Will has noticed that Alana is careful to follow his training style and reinforce the lessons he gives them. Not that they’ve talked about it, of course.

“I’ve never been accused of being a positive influence before.” He takes a swig of his beer.

“Now that you have, how do you like it?”

Is she flirting with him? He flushes, and it’s not the alcohol. He would—but he can’t— “Um,” he clears his throat, “how’s the book coming along?”

“Oh, fine.” The teasing lilt has vanished from her voice; she sighs. “The press ever so graciously extended my manuscript deadline so my little ‘personal crisis’ could be accommodated.”

“You know, Freddie still owes me one. I could sic her on them for you. See how they like being the first academic press to headline on Tattlecrime.”

When she laughs she doesn’t sound quite so tired, and he’s emboldened to try another tack, safe at the stove where he doesn’t have to make eye contact. “What was the book you were reading this afternoon?”

“Poetry—it’s called Averno.”

“Any good? It did put you out cold.” This whole conversation is making him feel so strange, like they could just be two visiting lecturers at Quantico, on a date, talking about _books_. It’s a seductive illusion. He imagines putting together a plate of snacks—no, _hors d’oeuvres_ —and putting them on the table in front of her, a hand alighting casually between her shoulder blades. It would be easy. He thinks she might play along. The thought fills him with equal parts longing and panic.

“One of my favorites.” The book, right. “It’s not exactly bedtime material, I was just—I don’t know. Tired...” There’s a little pause, and he hears her flipping pages. “Want to hear one?”

“Sure.”

“It’s the first part of a poem called ‘Landscape.’” And she reads out:

> The sun is setting behind the mountains,  
>  the earth is cooling.  
>  A stranger has tied his horse to a bare chestnut tree.  
>  The horse is quiet—he turns his head suddenly,  
>  hearing, in the distance, the sound of the sea.

Pretty, he thinks, stirring; it reminds him of hiking in the Alleghenies.

> I make my bed for the night here,  
>  spreading my heaviest quilt over the damp earth.
> 
> The sound of the sea—  
>  when the horse turns its head, I can hear it.
> 
> On a path through the bare chestnut trees,  
>  a little dog trails its master.

In those last two lines, the color of the poem seems to change somehow, and he’s suddenly uneasy, but she doesn’t slow down, her mellow, rich voice sweeps him onward—

> The little dog—didn’t he used to rush ahead,  
>  straining the leash, as though to show his master  
>  what he sees there, there in the future—
> 
> the future, the path, call it what you will.

He swallows hard on the loss in his throat. _Used to_ ; and that means _not any more_ , doesn’t it. She knows he—she knows everything this year has taken from him. His life, his dogs. Why would she dig into him this way? But he doesn’t move to stop her.

> Behind the trees, at sunset, it is as though a great fire  
>  is burning between two mountains  
>  so that the snow on the highest precipice  
>  seems, for a moment, to be burning also.
> 
> Listen: at the path’s end the man is calling out.  
>  His voice has become very strange now,  
>  the voice of a person calling to what he can’t see.
> 
> Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees.  
>  Until the animal responds  
>  faintly, from a great distance,  
>  as though this thing we fear  
>  were not so terrible.
> 
> Twilight: the stranger has untied his horse.
> 
> The sound of the sea—  
>  just memory now.

She falls silent. The only sound is the hiss of the stove. He’s bracing himself against the counter, the words echoing in his ears. _The voice of a person calling to what he can’t see._ Will feels as though his chest is being crushed in some inexorable machine. He thinks of the vast darkness around his house, the long nights—the trails bristling with ghosts, that only take him farther into the unsparing future. His breaths come fast and shallow, and he stares determinedly at the stove, eyes welling up.

He flinches at the touch of her hand on his shoulder, at the kindness radiating off of her. It would be easy to lean into it, but something in him turns cold and hard-shelled against her.

“Averno is a crater lake that was supposed to be the entrance to the underworld,” she says—of all the fucking things—but there’s a bitter humor in her voice. “It seems … appropriate.”

“You don’t even talk to me,” he blurts. There’s a small, bruised silence. She takes a breath to say something else but he cuts her off. “I don’t want to do this.” He can’t look at her.

The warmth of her presence disappears abruptly as she backs away. “Okay,” she says, small. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go and—shower.”

She shuts herself in the bathroom, and Will is left alone in the kitchen with his chopped onions.

 _—faintly, from a great distance,_  
_as though this thing we fear_  
_were not so terrible—_

But it is, isn’t it.

***

They retreat back into their habitual silence for the rest of the evening. Alana takes the dogs out to use up the last of the twilight, and Will tries in vain to distract himself.

In the morning, the dogs need an extra long walk, since he and Alana will be gone all day. Despite their high spirits, the lines from the poem nag at him, as much as he tries to shake them off. How could she say those things to him?

Before the Shrike case, before everything, she was the one person who made Quantico seem bearable. He liked her laugh, he liked her watchful kindness. She had been his ally in a dozen subtle ways, and it had filled him with such an idiotic puppy love for her, such blind and senseless trust, that he couldn’t believe that she would fail him even while she was doing it.

From the moment Hannibal set him up, her kindness had begun to drain away. He had made Will into a wreck so that she would pity him; he had made Will into a monster so that she would hate him. And she’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker, and she fell into Hannibal’s arms when he decided he wanted that too, and Will was a damn fool but he had been heartbroken every single time.

And _now_ she was going to take a scalpel to his most private griefs? _Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees._ Oh, he had called out.

At this point Saucy rushes up with a giant stick, wagging eagerly, and Will has to put aside his bitter reverie in favor of tug-of-war. When Winston starts to look a little left out, they switch to a loose game of tag, Winston and Saucy hurtling through the bushes together. Will jumps in for a sprint here and there, and pretty soon he’s winded and laughing, sweating in his light jacket.

“Who’s my dog?” he yells to Winston.

“Ruff!” Winston barks back, right on cue.

Things are so simple for the dogs: friendship without horror, pleasure without shame. He didn’t think he could get those things back, much less deserve them. But he whistles to round them up and head back home, and they come dashing, and for a moment there’s nothing to feel guilty about.

He and Alana head into town later in the Volvo. The sky is white but the day is shaping up to be stifling anyway, and the hour-long drive is subdued. Alana is still quiet, maybe embarrassed. He wishes he could think of a way to make everything okay between them.

He thinks about the look on her face when she said “I woke up and no one knew where you were.” That sadness. Like it was obvious.

***

He drops her off at the McDonald’s so that she can catch up on her wifi, and heads to run his errands. A quick stop at Riehl’s, then his PO box, the bank, the grocery store. He’s done sooner than he expected, but it’s still been almost two hours.

His chores had been a welcome distraction from the awkwardness of their—whatever it is; now he sighs and tries to pull himself together to be pleasant on the drive back. Maybe he should apologize to her, even. If he hadn’t gotten upset they might have had their first real conversation in weeks.

As he gets out of his car, he sees Alana talking on the phone on the far edge of the patio, away from the scattered handful of people finishing their lunches. He can’t see her face, but her body language is vehement, as if she’s arguing with someone. He frowns, heading closer.

A snatch of her conversation carries to him: “wouldn’t call him even-keeled, but—”

His blood runs cold. Theoretically, she could be talking about any number of things. But ugly suspicion sends Will’s heart lurching into his throat, and he heads toward her quickly, straining to hear.

“Look, he’s not keeping it loaded, I don’t know what to tell you—” He keeps his gun in a locked drawer, and he hasn’t so much as looked at it since the last time he cleaned it. Before Alana showed up. But he let her spend all that time alone in his cabin—plenty of time to snoop, apparently. Who for? The Bureau? “—evidence of danger—no, there’s nobody _around_ , Jack!”

There it is. Jack ordered this. The Bureau wants to know if he is killing anyone these days, and Alana is their operative.

Will hears his heart thudding dimly in his ears, and he knows he’s beginning to panic. The facts fall into place in slow motion: the Bureau is reconsidering whether to trust him. The Bureau is reconsidering whether he should have been allowed out to pasture. The Bureau is reconsidering its _lenience_ regarding the issue of Randall Tier. And Alana has been lying to him for them.

He can’t believe he didn’t see it before. It’s so obvious. Why else would she barge in and then just hang around? All of that stuff about “seeing how you were,” about “you’re not like him,” about his _dog_ —obvious fucking ploys to gain his trust. And he _knew_ it, he could smell it on her, and he fell for it anyway, with his stupid, grasping heart, desperate for her kindness.

He wanted to believe she came out of some, what, some sweet and tender feeling? But this time isn’t different from any other. She’s only here to work on his profile. All her silences: not _mysterious_ so much as _professionally calculated_. She knew he’d twig if she asked too many questions. She always was a brilliant interrogator. That must have been what the poem was about, too—prod him, catch him off guard, see what she could get to thrash up out of the muck.

She’s probably even treating it as a vacation to work on her book. It’s not like she can’t multitask.

The cloud cover has burned off and instead a hot merciless brightness knifes down over the steel and concrete courtyard. Alana’s hanging up and turning and she’s seen him, and that’s bad, he’s not ready to handle this, if they’re investigating him he needs to stay calm, he can’t go back there, he _can’t_ —his thoughts start skipping like a broken record as adrenaline roars through him.

“Will! Hey,” she says, smiling at him. “Ready to head out?” She must not realize that he overheard her. But her smile falters. Good. She shouldn’t be smiling at him, like everything is okay. Like she’s his friend.

His panicky daze flips over into anger. Black rage fills his throat.

“How’s Jack?” he grits out.

A wariness crosses her face. “Jack is worried about you.”

He laughs outright, too loud. “That’s great!” he says. “How nice. It’s great to have friends who are worried about me, and know that when I’m no longer useful they’ll keep me under _surveillance_ because they _worry_.”

He steps towards her, unable to stop himself. “Friends who lie to me. Friends who bait their hooks with me. Friends who lock me in cages. Friends who tell me that my memories are meaningless. Friends who keep me under close investigation. I am such a _lucky boy_.”

As he talks, he can see her shifting her posture, putting herself at an angle to him and lowering her hands, holding her expression determinedly neutral. Her eyes flick behind him, as though the people on the patio are starting to stare. He can practically hear the crisis responder litany going through her head: _de-escalation of agitated suspect, step one: assume nonthreatening body language._ She’s disappearing behind the glossy carapace of Dr Bloom, criminal psychology expert. Next she’s going to try to form a verbal rapport.

“I know that this has been a painful and traumatic time for you, Will, and I am so very sorry for my part in it.” Her voice is impeccably modulated: soft, clear, gentle. She could be reading off cue cards. “I can see that you’re upset. Do you want to talk about it with me, or do you want some time to yourself?”

He has to laugh. “All I wanted was to be alone. It’s almost like what I want is irrelevant, and you’re only asking to placate me.”

Another step forward, and finally the pressure of his anger gets a reaction: she leans back into the table behind her, almost imperceptibly. He’s glad. He wants to smash up her oh-so-professional act and see what’s underneath.

He can feel it surging up inside him, the ugly thing, the thing that Hannibal fed and watered and brutalized into strength. The utility knife in his pocket presses invitingly into his thigh.

“Is this guy bothering you, ma’am?” A thickset guy in camo shorts is trying to insert himself into the scene.

“Am I bothering you, Alana?” Will asks silkily. The other guy is bigger, but he’s got a self-righteous puffery that suggests he’s more interested in impressing Alana than fighting. Will’s feeling light on his toes, power coursing through him. It was so easy to take down Randall Tier.

“Sir, I’m a psychologist, and I have a professional relationship with this man,” she says, crisp as ever, even though she’s obviously fighting for calm. “I understand that you want to help, but I need you to step back and let us talk.”

The guy looks at her blankly, nonplussed at this brisk dismissal.

Will smirks at him. “You’re not going to get a piece of that, man. She likes it a little more—dangerous. _Professionally_ speaking.”

“Will,” she says, warningly, but her eyes are on the lunk, who’s flushing an angry purple. Violence is thick and heavy in the air.

“I don’t like your tone, asshole,” he says to Will. “You’re gonna apologize to the lady.”

“Why don’t you apologize to us both for being a limp-dick moron?”

And that’s it, that’s the ticket: the guy starts winding up a sloppy right hook. The sound of breaking glass shatters in Will’s ears—Randall’s face underneath him, that mask—

He blinks, his knees prickling on the rough concrete. The guy’s body is sprawled underneath him. Alana is shouting. His thoughts seem slow as molasses. Wasn’t he just standing up? How did they get down here? _I can’t go back_ , he’s thinking, over and over. His hand hurts. He’s in the middle of drawing back for a punch. He falters. How long has he been here? Randall’s body was limp, and warm. Almost tender. There’s a trickle of blood under the guy’s nose but—he’s moving—breath coming in big huffs—Alana’s trying to pry Will away. He stumbles up, breathing hard.

“Goddammit, Will, I _just_ told Jack where to stick it, what the _hell_ are you doing?”

The other guy is slowly getting to his feet. Alana wheels on him before he can do any more than hock a red-tinted loogie. “Now that you’ve disrespected my wishes and and assaulted my friend, I think it’s best that you leave.” The guy is still glaring at Will, but she gets between them and stares him down until he stalks away.

As soon as he backs off, Alana turns on Will. “What the hell was that? You’re angry with me, fine, but picking a fight with a burly idiot outside of a McDonald’s?”

Will looks up at her groggily from the picnic bench. “You should watch your mouth with Jack.” She’s gonna get herself fired.

She blinks, momentarily thrown off her rampage. “What?”

“It’s not like he gives a rat’s ass how fancy your faculty appointment is.”

Her jaw sets. For a small woman she can be strongly reminiscent of a pitbull. “I talk to Jack however I damn well please.”

The sun beats down. It’s brutally hot. He’s too exhausted to deal with her playing dumb. “Alright,” he says. “Your back woods vacation is over. Time to make your play, whatever it is.”

She nods, then pauses to visibly pull herself together: shoulders back, chin up, hands at her sides. “I am sorry I went through your things, Will. Jack and I are worried. But I violated your privacy as a guest in your home. I’ll drive out this afternoon.”

He stares at her. “What, is that it? Don’t want to do the dirty work? Should I be expecting some real agents to pay me a visit tonight? You could at least be a _pal_ ,” he sneers the word, “and tell me what to expect.”

“Nobody’s coming—what are you talking about?”

“I assume the plan is to use the threat of arrest to coerce me into doing some dirty work for the Bureau. But I can think of a few other possibilities. I certainly wouldn’t want to tell the FBI their business.”

She stares at him, and then she goes white. “You think I’m still working for them. How could you think that?”

Now he’s pissed. “Why are you still trying to play this off? I overheard you reporting in to Jack.”

She almost sputters, she’s so worked up. “Of course I was talking to Jack about you—but I wasn’t reporting in, jesus—Jack cares about you! He was convinced I was going to find you spread across the walls when I got here, and with you acting like this, can you blame him?”

Will swallows. He feels glitchy and fogged. “You were arguing about my gun. Whether I was—dangerous.”

“‘A danger to self or others,’ Will, the criteria for involuntary commitment. Jack was trying to tell me I should force you back into therapy. Which, as I said to him, is _completely_ inappropriate. And there are no grounds.” She glares at him. “Or there weren’t.”

He tries to scrub through his memory and prove that she’s just trying to put him off, but his mind is blank and exhausted, and he’s starting to have the uncomfortable feeling that when he can think clearly again, he’s going to be very unhappy with himself. He looks up at her now, shaky with washed-out adrenaline.

It’s dawning on Alana, too. “You thought we were investigating you. Oh, god.” She sits down on the bench beside him. “No wonder you were freaking out.”

He huffs a laugh. “Yeah, no shit.”

They sit for a minute, contemplating the parking lot and their assorted failures.

“You haven’t been lying to me,” he says, a question.

“Of course not.”

“And the Bureau’s not going to call me back in.”

She sighs. “Not for Randall Tier.”

Not good enough. Will is silent.

“You know the answer to this, Will. They’re not going to make a play for you until he comes back.”

He doesn’t want to know that.

“Let’s go home,” he says.

***

Will feels a palpable wash of relief the moment they get on the highway out of town, taking comfort in the tall, straight pines that speed past them on both sides, but he’s still as weak and trembly as a sick child.

He tries to think about what just happened, but he can’t seem to reach it. It’s like a blurry Polaroid: he can see it from the outside, but the real place is stuck on the other side of the lens. The rage seemed to come from nowhere and suffuse him completely in an instant. A struck match, a filled cup. Brimming and burning. It was so familiar.

He tries to remember anything between that sloppy first punch and Alana hauling him off, but his mind returns him only chaos, and shattering glass, and Randall’s face under the mask. Hannibal’s voice slips sibilant through these queasy thoughts: _If you followed the urges you have kept down for so long, cultivated them, as the inspirations they are, you would have become someone other than yourself._

He can’t be missing more than a few seconds. The guy was fine. He walked away. Alana didn’t—if he’d—if it had been bad, she would have said something. She would have helped him. So he must have stopped himself, somehow.

Alana lets out a long, controlled sigh next to him, but she’s just quietly looking out the window.

The road rolls on, and the trees get older. A residual anger lingers in him, like the kind that follows you after a bad dream—how easily she slipped back into unflappable, high-gloss Dr Bloom. The awkwardness that had dogged her all day had vanished without a trace, like she could just shrug him off, the whole weight of their relationship, like it’s nothing—his hands are tapping an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel. He makes himself stop.

He really shouldn’t be surprised that Alana and Jack have been talking about him behind his back. Will can practically hear Jack saying _spread across the walls_ —that’s got to be straight from the horse’s mouth. And the heavy weight of her gaze, always tripping him up, darting away just when he thinks he’ll catch her staring—was she totting up points toward suicide and points against? Rating every action? Would a suicidal person spend as much time pruning as he does?

She exhales again, tremulously, and when he looks over she ducks away, scrubbing a hand across her face.

“Alana,” he says.

Her voice comes out thick. “It’s nothing.”

Will pulls the car over. When the engine turns off, her shaky breathing is loud in the silence. Her shoulders are rigid with misery. This is Alana, finally, stripped of the protective coating of Dr Bloom, and somewhere between his concern and his bewilderment he feels a flash of greedy pleasure. It makes him want to hold her tight, let her cry into his shirt, for as long as she needs.

But when he reaches out to touch her, she flinches away and fumbles to let herself out of the car. She throws up a hand behind her to stop him. “Don’t—I just, I need a minute, don’t—”

What right does he have to play the protector when he’s the one she should be afraid of?

So he sits in the car, guilt heavy under his breastbone, and watches her through the open passenger door. On the gravel scree beside the road she hugs her knees to her chest like a little girl. Her shoulders shake silently. The air is hot and still.

***

Will doesn’t sleep much that night. His bones are still vibrating. It made so much damn sense for her to be investigating him—at least as a way to sweep all her behavior under one heading. She’s been such an unfamiliar combination of blank silence and sharp corners, unrecognizable as the ruthlessly correct pillar of strength she used to be. He thought of her as about the only really good person.

But it’s not very useful to conclude that something must be wrong, because of course almost everything has gone wrong, and it would be facile to pick and choose. The only thing that is becoming clear is that whatever she’s feeling, she’s not interested in an even footing. She’d rather confer with Jack about the contents of his locked cabinets than ask him whether he’s thought about offing himself; she’d rather bury herself in a professional life that is no longer available to him than make conversation in the afternoons. He thought he was extending a simple favor to her, letting her stay here. But it feels less simple all the time.

The idea of the house, which he has held in his mind for so long, is to have a still point. He trusts timber and drywall. Their nature is the long haul: they have an integrity, a kindness. The house will keep him cupped inside no matter what gusts through him, shaking his bones. And up here there’s room for everything burning and caustic in him to spill over safely—but only if he’s alone. It’s dangerous to get too close.

He wanted it to be okay for here to be here, but it isn’t, really. His hand knew the weight of his knife, knew the grip of it. That’s just as much a part of him as the rest.

In the morning he still hasn’t accepted what he has to do. He lingers outside the cabin after he gets up, pretending that he’s going to do chores, but he can’t bring himself to get started. He pulls a few weeds here and there. After a while, he hears the coffee pot gurgling inside.

Alana comes around the corner holding two mugs, and sits beside him on the bench. She’s wearing a sleeveless white blouse and bermuda shorts, a low bun. It’s all very J Crew.

“Morning,” he says.

She hands him a mug. The coffee’s black. He only used to drink it that way when he was on a case, to goad himself onward; he grimaces in an imitation of thanks.

“I thought we should have a conversation,” she says, “since we haven’t been doing a very good job so far.”

He nods warily.

“Social ties can help us reforge our selves after trauma,” she says. “But only if they give us a sense of safety and stability.”

“I knew it was a breach of your privacy to invite myself here, but I did it anyway because—” She sighs. “Last year, I didn’t intervene when I should have, and I didn’t believe you when I should have, because I refused to admit what was happening. I failed you, Will.”

He shrugs, not wanting to get into it. “It wasn’t your fault.”

She waves that off impatiently. “It’s not about fault. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. I wasn’t going to let you stay alone if you needed an ally. But now I need you to help me assess whether my being here is conducive to a stable environment for you.”

Two days ago she was flirting with him, yesterday she sat and cried at the side of the road, and today she’s conducting a carefully-staged clinical consult using words like “conducive.” She has completely excised herself from this conversation and put up a front of transparency to cover it.

He guesses he deserves it.

“Stable? Going on the evidence, no,” he says, to the trees.

“What I need you to help me understand, Will,” she continues, “is whether my continued presence would be more of a help than a hindrance.”

More doctor talk. He is sick of the heat, sick of himself, sick of her. “What do you want?”

“This isn’t about what I want, it’s about what you need,” she says determinedly. “It’s inevitable that my presence here brings up a lot of painful emotions for you, and I want to respond to that in the best way possible.”

“You want me to ask you to stay,” he says, to needle her.

“No, Will, I want you to communicate with me like an adult, as an agent of your own well-being—which you are perfectly capable of doing—instead of yelling at me periodically and then acting like a kicked dog!”

“I never asked you to come here!”

She’s about to snap back at him, but instead visibly lets it go and takes a slow sip of her coffee. The moment stretches, but she’s apparently prepared to wait him out. He almost gapes at her in frustration. Fine then. Time to pull out the big guns and be done.

“You know,” he says, “sometimes it really is obvious that you were his student. You have this _arrogance_ in common.” Her pretty blue eyes go wide and shocked, her mouth opens dumbly—or as in great pain—and he presses his advantage. “At this point, I no longer care what kind of complex you have about healing me. I have never been your patient, I am not your patient now, I do not find your attempts to exorcise your own guilt to be ‘conducive to a stable environment’—”

She throws up a hand to cut him off, rising from the bench. “I’ll go,” she says. “I’ll go.”

***

She packs up quickly. He’s surprised by how little effort it takes to disentangle her things from his; she’s been here for weeks, but she’s hardly sprawled at all.

The dogs get antsy as she loads her car, and Will has to grab Winston by the collar and sit him down to keep him from jumping in the back seat.

Alana closes the trunk, settles Saucy in the passenger seat, and walks brusquely back to the driver’s side. She’s keeping her gaze angled away from him, her body language resolutely shut and cold.

He didn’t want it to be like this. “You were right,” he interjects. “Back in November. You aren’t good for me, and I’m not good for you.”

After a moment, she turns back to him, pale. “I will _never_ ,” she says, “work for the Bureau again. I—” But she stops there, and her mouth thins, and she opens the door.

Not the closing statement he was expecting, but okay. “Goodbye, Alana,” he says.

And she gets in the car and drives away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If he presses his face into Winston’s soft belly and his eyes prickle with furious tears, well, no one has to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quotes in this chapter come from the poems [October](http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/08/16/october-louise-gluck/) and [Averno](http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/10/03/averno-louise-gluck/), from Louise Glück's book [Averno](http://www.amazon.com/Averno-Poems-Louise-Gl%C3%BCck/dp/0374530742).

The only bad thing about it is that Winston doesn’t understand. Will distracts him with a long walk, with many sprints and smells and squirrels, but when evening comes he can’t keep Winston from watching the door forlornly.

The third time Winston looks up in excitement at nothing, Will feels a flash of annoyance. “They went home,” he informs Winston. “It was time.”

Winston looks at him appealingly, as though he might be able to change everything magically with a flick of the wrist. When it becomes clear Will’s only going to glare, he lays his head on his paws with a huff. Will goes to get a beer.

While he’s in the kitchen, it occurs to him that the stove hasn’t been cleaned in a while, and the whole room could use some scrubbing, so even though it’s eight thirty at night he gets the mop and the scrub brush out of the closet and drinks beer and cleans, angrily, until everything that’s new enough to still shine shines and everything else is clean, at least, and then Winston gives him an inquiring eyeball and he gives in and flops on the couch in a sulk.

That night, he breaks all his usual rules and lets Winston sleep on the bed with him. If he presses his face into Winston’s soft belly and his eyes prickle with furious tears, well, no one has to know.

In the morning, he doesn’t go out because Alana’s not there to avoid by going out. It’s only now dawning on him to what extent he was aware of her as a constant presence, a pole he was always either moving towards or being pushed away from. The other room—he carefully does not think of it as hers—is empty now and he’s the only person for Winston to play with, a fact of which he is frequently reminded, as Winston tries to get Will to take him out. Will drinks coffee and grinds his teeth until he feels twitchy and cross-eyed from the caffeine. When he’s drunk the whole pot he finally opens the door and stumps outside behind his joyfully bounding dog. It is an irritatingly beautiful day.

He’d kept hoping that things would get easier between them. Clearly that was an idle wish. He shouldn’t even have let her stay in the first place. He’s a toxic waste dump and she’s never going to take off her biohazard suit and that’s fine. Fine. Now he won’t be able to bring her down with him. It was the right thing to do.

Winston trots up with a tennis ball in his mouth and looks up eagerly. Will glares. Winston sits and pleads harder. Will sighs. Winston puts the ball on the ground and then nudges it forward ever so tactfully with his nose.

“Fine,” Will says, picking it up. “But only a few rounds.”

***

He’d only thought of Alana’s things as extra clutter, before, but without them, his own things seem strangely dull and limited. Same almost-empty bottle of Suave in the bathroom; same books. He pauses in front of the bookshelf. Down on one of the lower shelves, there’s a familiar slim white spine—that book of poetry—and next to it sits a thick black binder that looks exactly like the binder she’s been keeping her manuscript in.

He pulls it out and flips it open, blinking in surprise: that’s exactly what it is. How could she have forgotten this? The shelf is hard to see from the center of the room, half-hidden behind the back of the couch—but that binder should have been at the top of her packing list.

Should he call her? She’s been working on it the whole trip, she’s obviously going to need it back—or is she going to remember it and turn around to pick it up? She could show up any time. He can’t imagine that she’ll make it all the way back to DC without realizing.

Will hasn’t actually talked to her about the book since last fall. It was only a couple weeks before he got pulled onto the Shrike case—they’d gotten coffee at a sterile, depressing Quantico cafe for one of their occasional collegial chats, ie, chances for Will to sweat nervously while he tried to impress her. He remembers mostly how pretty she looked and the hot flush of awkwardness he felt about it, but they’d ended up having an interesting conversation about her book.

She’d just finished a follow-up round of interviews to help turn her dissertation into a better-rounded book, and she was trying to figure out how to reorganize it to fit the new material into her argument. They’d had to commandeer the whole table next to them, but by the time they wrapped up it seemed pretty clear where the main discussion of the new results should go, and which of the other chapters would need substantial revision in order to tie it in. It had actually been kind of fun.

So, mostly to stall figuring out his next step, he starts flipping through the pages, skipping ahead to the new chapters. He digs in, but by the time he’s skimmed his way through, he’s frowning down at it in puzzlement.

The new chapters are there, all right, but barely. They’re really just a sketchy outline, with none of the discussion she needs to extend her thesis; fine as far as it goes, but her redline comments barely do any more than tweak the sentences that are already down. He flips to the other chapters they’d talked about, whose arguments needed revising—same thing. They’re essentially unchanged, with a few faltering editorial comments.

What it looks like, once he’s sat with it for a while, is that Alana hasn’t been working on this book at all. These edits show barely more than an hour’s worth of actual progress from the whole time she’s been here. After all those hours on the couch brandishing that binder like a shield.

Intermittently between the pages there are little doodles, in the same fine-point red pen as her comments: dark blotches done in scribbles and cross-hatch. They’re almost endearingly clumsy, from someone so precise, but a kind of anxiety radiates from the dense snarls.

All this time he’s resentfully assumed that she was showing off her fancy job, or walling herself off with it. She had something valuable waiting for her back there, after all, anchoring her, while he drifted around in the back of beyond. And he’d thought she was refusing to talk to him about the book—much less anything else—because she didn’t consider them to be colleagues any longer. But what if she wasn’t trying to block him out as much as hide herself away?

He thinks of the look of exhaustion that crossed her face when he asked her about the book, and it seems painfully, painfully obvious. He rocks back on the couch, trying to absorb this.

The other book is on the coffee table in front of him; his eyes land on it and then stay there. That poem had shaken him. He can’t remember the words now, but the image is vivid in his mind: the man and the little dog in the mountains, separated in the dark. And a vast, tidal sweep of loss that had seemed to move through it, somehow. It had been offensive to think that she had refused to have a regular conversation with him and yet ambushing him with something like that was fair game. But if her silences were self-protection and not disdain…

The book is elegantly made, but showing signs of wear around the corners. He flips through the first pages and is surprised to see some annotations here, too; he wouldn’t have figured her for the writing-in-books type, even if the marks are strictly in pencil, easily erased. A bracketed stanza leaps out at him:

> Summer after summer has ended,  
>  balm after violence:  
>  it does me no good  
>  to be good to me now;  
>  violence has changed me.

He swallows, thinking about the new emptiness of the cabin around him. _Violence has changed me._ Yes, it has. The book might as well have reached out and jabbed him in the chest.

But Alana didn’t read this to him. She certainly didn’t underline it for him. He reads on, breath speeding up a little, hooked by its taut strength. The voice rings out in his mind, cold and precise, surveying the comforts available and finding no comfort in them. It’s a poem of irrevocable injury, change that can never be taken back. It hurts to read, but something rises up in him proudly, in a kind of triumph, a shared victory: yes, he thinks again. It sings with life that can’t be denied.

He thinks of Alana sitting on the porch in her pretty sundresses, avoiding her manuscript, avoiding him. Reading this instead. Thinking about who she will be, now. Maybe, like him, so angry that it is a kind of happiness. He keeps reading, not quickly, but pulled inexorably forward. The book says: what comes after harm is for so long not recovery. It is only endurance. And he thinks, yes.

It begins to dawn on him, as he reads, that this book is not—the man and the little dog aside—about him. There are girls’ childhood games and stories of Persephone. Girlhood, girlhood and the kind of harm that ends it; how these things look from a long, dispassionate vantage. He is uncomfortable with these cold visions. He feels for the first time as though he’s intruding on Alana’s privacy.

How old was she when she met Hannibal? She must have been practically fresh from undergrad. These stories about Persephone meeting the lord of death—he tries to imagine what she looked like then, how youth would have softened her face. Her resolute maturity has always seemed like a kind of armor to him. But sitting on his porch, reading these poems, Alana must have been thinking about the girl who first realized that armor was something she needed.

> You get on a train, you disappear.  
>  You write your name on the window, you disappear.
> 
> There are places like this everywhere,  
>  places you enter as a young girl  
>  from which you never return.

And he thinks, heart in his throat, of Abigail. She’s gone. Too little armor, too late; too strong the pull of the underworld. She was already so far gone by the time he met her. For the first time he thinks maybe there was no way for him to save her. Maybe the dark had already opened up beneath her. He squeezes his eyes shut, and his eyelashes are wet with tears.

But all he can ever know is that now she’s gone. And Alana is gone too, not lost to the world but lost to him, and he is unmoored by the sadness that washes through him when he thinks of waking up to a house without her tomorrow.

He thought he was keeping her safe by sending her away. But she’s been slowly self-destructing for weeks right in front of him. He can’t do anything for Abigail, it’s too late for that. But it’s obvious that Alana needs something. He has to at least try.

“Well,” he says to Winston, who opens an eye at him sleepily. “Time to go for a ride.”

***

The first thing he does is drive down the highway until he gets cell reception, but Alana doesn’t pick up and he can’t think of a voicemail message, so he doesn’t leave one.

She left late in the morning yesterday, which means she could have covered quite a lot of ground even if she stopped for the night after dinner; and today maybe she’s gone on even further. Theoretically she could even be home by now.

He doesn’t really think she is, though. She had gone into that conversation hoping to have a kumbaya session, not to get thrown out; if he’s right about her book, she’s not in any hurry to go back to the east coast. It would be like Alana to hit pause as soon as she accepted that she was too emotionally compromised to make a sound decision.

That narrows the range considerably. St Ignace is the first proper-sized town within a few hours of driving, and it’s just this side of the psychological barrier of the water: if she were conflicted about leaving, it would be the first logical stopping point.

It’s just a hunch. In some ways, it would make more sense for her to have gone all the way to Ohio or Pennsylvania yesterday. But his hunches did used to be pretty good.

He does actually know how to use his phone, even if he hasn’t turned it on in a month, and he starts racking up data charges putting together a list of hotels that fit the profile. Near the highway; pets allowed; drop out the highest couple price brackets; that’s a manageable list.

He swings through three hotel parking lots without any evidence of her little hybrid, and he’s starting to think he miscalculated, but in the fourth one there it is, parked neatly at the end of the row. Even better, it’s a motel. No convenient lies to the front desk required.

“Wish me luck,” he says to Winston, who wags.

***

The first door he knocks on doesn’t open, and doesn’t appear to be occupied. He moves on to the next closest to her car, and hears Saucy barking inside before he even knocks.

“Will,” Alana says, wide-eyed, “what are you doing here?”

“You were lying,” he says. He feels buoyant.

“What?”

“You left your book behind,” he says, holding up the offending item. “So I realized you were lying.”

She takes it half out of surprise, thanking him automatically, then frowns. “I’ve never lied to you.”

“This whole time you’ve been pretending that you’re here just to take care of me, and you pretend to work on your book, and you pretend that you being here isn’t about what you want.”

Something shuts in her expression. “You could have mailed it,” she says, flat and sour. “We didn’t need to keep having this fight.”

He blinks at her, and forces himself to pull back, get himself under wraps. Gentle. “That’s not what I mean.” He puts his hands down. “Can I come in?”

She scrutinizes him, and opens the door. It’s just a regular room with an ugly bedspread and the A/C on high. Saucy wags hello, but she doesn’t leave Alana’s side.

All the things he had imagined saying to her seem incoherent, now, with her standing in her bare feet in front of him, arms crossed. She’s wearing a ratty t-shirt, and she doesn’t look like she’s washed her hair in a while.

“You haven’t been working on your book,” he says again, “and you won’t talk to me about it.”

She takes a breath to start some counterpoint, but he raises his hand to forestall it.

“I’m coming out of retirement for five minutes just to give a profile, so listen to me,” he says. “Let me do this.” Looking at her is getting harder so he stares at the wallpaper, marshaling his evidence. “You’re pretending you’re fine, but you’re not fine,” he begins. “You’re worried about your book. You’re worried about your job, whether you can still do it, whether they’ll give you tenure. Your leg hurts you almost all the time. Hannibal betrayed ten years of your trust. And you’ve been working like hell to keep me from knowing any of that because you don’t want it to spill over onto me.”

They’re standing very close. “Don’t lie to me, Alana.” Saucy is staring at him watchfully.

“I thought I was _arrogant_ ,” she says bitterly. “Just like him.”

“I was—upset, when I said that.”

She swallows, and turns half away to the window, hugging her crossed arms.

“I woke up,” she says after a moment, “and Abigail was dead, and Hannibal had vanished, and Jack was glued to Bella’s bedside—and you were gone, Will. And—it’s not like you owed me anything, after the way I treated you—I just.” She gives a shaky smile. “I had this little suite in the hospital, and there was this one bouquet of tulips from Georgetown that the program assistant had sent over, pretending it was ‘from everyone.’” Her lip curls. “She’s very sweet.”

“So I did my rehab and went home, and tried to figure out how to write a book about my psychological expertise. Which—” She pauses, face bleak. “I’ve known Hannibal for twelve years, Will. My entire professional life. I went into criminal psychology because I wanted to understand evil—but what do I know?” Furious tears spring to her eyes. “Twelve _years_. I thought he was the best analyst I’d ever met. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to do something good in the world, and the whole time I’ve been taking my cues from a psychopath. And everyone knows it! Oh, Hannibal Lecter’s little protègée: how _awful_! Her chair must really be regretting _that_ hire.” She pauses. “No one in the department would even talk to me. They were too busy gossiping about how they knew something was off about him, all along.”

“Bullshit,” he breaks out, indignant on her behalf. He hadn’t considered what consequences Hannibal’s change in professional stature would have for her academic career. “Nobody knew.”

She gives him a wan smile. “I should have. I should have seen something.”

“You did,” he points out.

“Not soon enough!”

He’s spent a lot of time being angry with her for exactly that, but with her looking so miserably small and tired and folded in on herself, somehow the sting has gone out of it. “There’s a long list of people who got murdered for believing me,” he says. “Forgive me if I’m glad that you’re not on it.”

She turns to look at him properly. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve said all summer.” It’s a joke, but then again, not really.

“I—missed you,” he says.

She closes her eyes. The drone of the A/C shuts off, leaving a deep hush. “I don’t want to go home.”

“To DC.”

“This spring, it was—” She trails off, looking away. Her threadbare t-shirt hangs on her shoulders. Under his fingers, it would be soft, almost gauzy. But the two paces between them seem uncrossable. “I couldn’t really walk, after I was discharged. I was in a chair for weeks. I had to hire movers to bring all my things down to the first floor. I felt like Rip van Winkle, like I’d woken up a hundred years old. And everyone I knew was dead.”

It had been so obvious, and he had blown right past it: right alongside all her professional excuses, that sadness, that gray look. He’d avoided thinking about what it would take to make Alana look like that. But now he sees it all in a flash, as if he were still standing outside her house and looking in at her through the window: walled into her stylish, antiseptic house, with a smashed-up past and a grayed-out future. Just as alone as he was.

“I kept pulling up your number,” she says, voice distant. “But I didn’t want to impose.”

The fabric of her defenses is so thin, now, which is what he wanted—all her bullshit abandoned—leaving a sad-eyed woman with goosebumps on her bare arms. But it’s too much, too stark. He’s not sure how to act without the wall of her self-assurance on the other side. So he does nothing, hands heavy at his sides.

She looks down. “You _left_ , Will,” she says, pressing her lips into a determined line, and finally Will’s back brain knows what to do. He pulls her into his arms and she tucks herself against him like it’s the most natural thing in the world, for him to hug her.

Her breath shudders out in a sob, so he lets himself touch her, stroking her back as easily as if he were comforting the dogs; she clamps down after only a few teary hiccups escape, and he expects her to pull away then, but she seems totally unselfconscious about leaning against him, tears blotting into his shirt. She’s warm and her hair smells good, which he is not thinking about.

When he left DC, he’d been too numbed out to care who else was alive. It had never even occurred to him that he might be missed. Of course, it might have dawned on him earlier if she hadn’t worked so hard to keep him from having any idea how she felt.

As if reading his mind, she pulls back a little and glances up at him, then drops her forehead against his collarbone with a soft thunk. “I didn’t want you to have to deal with my problems. I didn’t want to be _having_ problems.” Her sigh is warm against his chest. “So that’s working well.”

Will nestles his cheek against her head. “This is—better, though,” he says, heart thumping.

But she’s distracted by her own worry. “It’s already August,” she says, “and I’m so behind. Fuck. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“‘The Devil Was My Thesis Advisor,’” he says speculatively. “You can always write for the pulps if everything else goes to hell. Freddie would love to coauthor.”

She groans and socks him. “Don’t joke about things like that,” she says, pulling herself from his arms and heading into the bathroom to wash her face. She leaves the door open. Will stuffs his hands in his pockets.

“How did you find me here?” she asks, briefly invisible as she grabs a towel.

“I don’t know if you know this,” he says, “but I used to work for the FBI.”

She makes a face at him in the mirror, and he relents, telling her about checking every hotel in St Ignace. “It occurred to me that you might not really want to go back to DC.”

“Judging by the panic attack I had in the car, that would be a no.” She leans herself against the door frame, eyes closed, and doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “I’ve been thinking about taking a semester of leave.”

“How would your tenure committee feel about that?” From the ripple of unhappiness that crosses her face, he shouldn’t have asked. “You don’t have to decide that now,” he says instead.

She nods, blowing out her breath. Will looks for a change of subject. “How did you decide to come up here?”

“It was Jack, actually,” she admits, glancing at him to check whether he’s upset about that. “He showed up on my doorstep one afternoon waving his arms and shouting about had I talked to Brauer, did I know about the dogs. Apparently he’d run into Leonard at work, and Leonard told him you’d lost the dogs before you left. I didn’t know anything about it. At that point, we both figured it would be worth trying to get in touch with you. I had to talk him down, actually, he was ready to leave that afternoon.”

“I didn’t know you two were such pals.”

She tilts her head quizzically. “We’re not.”

There’s a weird feeling in his stomach at the idea of them spending so much time thinking about him. His life in Virginia had seemed to be so irrevocably finished that all his ties to it should, by rights, have burned up, and left only empty air.

He can guess the next part of the story, at least. “And then you went looking for Winston.”

“When Jack came by, I was sitting on the floor of my bathtub,” she says, apparently at random. He frowns. “I’d been taking a shower and I just felt so—tired, I sat down in the middle of it. Turned the water off when it got cold. I don’t know how long it was before Jack rang the doorbell. So I wasn’t … sorry, to have something else to do. Jack wanted to have time to find you and see how you were, but he really didn’t. And I did.”

“You sent him packing and put yourself in charge,” he summarizes, unable to suppress a spark of amusement. “In your bathrobe.”

An answering crinkle lights up her eyes, but in a moment, she turns serious again. “You were my new project. I didn’t have to think about my feelings if I was thinking about yours instead. I should have known better, but—”

“I do make a tempting project,” he says dryly, “I’m aware.”

He means it as a joke, but she looks sick to her stomach. “It was a mistake,” she says. “I’d like—if it’s okay with you—I don’t want to go home yet. Can I—come back? As your friend. The way I should have been from the beginning.”

On some level he had known that this was where this whole excursion was going, at least on his part, but he hadn’t let himself think about it before now. It’s much safer for both of them if she leaves; that’s what he should have insisted on from the beginning. But he feels warm and slightly unhinged from the sheer emotional volume of this conversation. This is good, his back brain says, more of this. The internal fight is over fast, and he’s nodding. “We can go, if you want?”

There’s an awkward pause. “I actually think I’ll stay here, just for tonight,” she says. “I did pay for the room already.” Her hand braces the back of her hip. “Give me some time to sort myself out. There are some errands I want to run, anyway. I’ll drive back up in the morning,” she tells him, more firmly. “You should take the little monster with you, though, she does _not_ like this place.”

“Winston will be happy to see her.” And she’s great collateral, he thinks, but can’t quite make the joke out loud.

It proves difficult to explain the plan to Saucy, however, who is extremely opposed to the idea of letting Alana out of her sight. Alana has to actually put on her shoes and walk out to the parking lot with them—though once Winston starts barking enthusiastically through the cracked window of the Volvo, Saucy’s a lot more amenable to the proposition.

They manage to get both dogs corralled into the back seat, and then square off for their goodbye. Will’s still quashing down the impulse to ask her again to come with them tonight when she presses a kiss to his cheek.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

“Yes.”

She nods, and walks back inside, leaving Will rocked back on his feet in the late afternoon sun.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “And partly because you’re a real dick when you’re upset,” she adds tartly.

It’s so long before she arrives the next day that he’s seriously worried that she’s not coming, dog or no. As noon turns to one and then to two, his anxiety builds and he’s starting to think that she must be trying to make a point about all the shitty things he’s done, to really put the screws in on all his regrets.

Not that Alana has ever been one for mind games. Will tries to get a grip.

She pulls into the drive at nearly three, and apparently what took her all day was shopping. He helps her bring in her bags and start putting things away: fancy dog treats; a few six-packs of what she assures him are the best local microbrews—though it’s not clear how she knows that since he’s not sure she’s ever been in the middle of the country before—a CVS bag which he hastily leaves for her to deal with when he sees the tampons and the prescription bag; some expensive sunscreen; and a whole bag of other mysterious items which she’s bustling around to put away before he can even get a look.

“I thought we could make cake,” is what she says, brightly, and Will is so bewildered by the whole situation that he just frowns.

“This is what you want to do now?”

She stops bustling. Her determined cheer turns rueful. “I’m a guest in your home, Will. I thought it might be nice if I started doing the things that guests do. Presents, booze, food. Human things.”

He thinks about saying, it was easier when we spent all day in miserable silence, let’s go back to that. “What kind of cake?”

She flashes a grin at him with the mischievous good humor he hasn’t seen in her for a long time. “Icebox cake. Had it at my friend’s eighth birthday party and I wouldn’t rest until my mom made me one too. We used to make it together every summer.”

“I don’t have a lot of supplies,” he says dubiously.

“That,” she tells him, pulling a whisk out of the bottom of the bag and tapping him on the chest with it, “is the beauty of icebox cake.”

She sets him to work whipping the cream while she cleans off the counter. She presses a beer on him and makes conversation, determinedly at first, but more easily when he starts asking questions to draw her out. She tells him about her parents—father a literature professor at GW, mother an attorney at a DC firm—and her childhood just outside the city, firmly upper-middle class: private school and parties and trips to Europe.

It’s no surprise that she grew up well-off; he got the general drift years ago. But the wood paneling and creaky furniture of the cabin seem dated, all of a sudden, and he squirms at the rise of his old self-consciousness. Still, watching her like this, he can see what she must have been like, when she was younger: sunny, headstrong, not so guarded and tamped-down.

They wade deep into into an involved discussion of the best way to assemble the cake, given the limited assortment of plates to put it on, which requires a lot of descriptive hand gestures and debate over optimal stacking procedure; they settle on a layer-cake style instead of what Alana protests is the traditional horizontal log.

It turns out, to his private amusement, that Alana’s gifts do not extend to spreading whipped cream in a neat and tidy fashion. The third time a gob of cream lands on the floor and is instantly hoovered up by the lurking dogs, Will makes her relinquish her spatula and sit down.

She smiles up at him, unrepentant. “Come to think of it, this is how it always used to go when I cooked with my mom.”

“You must have been cute,” he says, to his immediate mortification.

She arches an eyebrow at him. “I was a happy kid,” she allows. “I lived in an orderly little bubble where most things went right, for most people, most of the time. I was so determined to get out and learn about the rest of the world—the real world, I thought. Serious things. I guess I got what I wanted.” She sighs. “But you can’t hide which one of us was the really cute one, Mr Angelic Mop of Curls. That picture of you in the other room is priceless. Is that your dad with you?”

He’d forgotten the picture was on the bookshelf in there. “Yeah, that’s him.” He focuses on the layer of cookies he’s spackling down. “I was not a happy kid,” he says, shortly.

“What did you want, growing up?”

He thinks about being a teenager in one shitty waterfront town after another: the itch under his skin, the dull thud of the days, the constant churn of horrors in his imagination. “I figured I’d be dead by now. All this has been more or less in the nature of an unpleasant surprise.” He thinks about it some more. “The best I ever hoped for was a house and a dog.” He starts smoothing the last of the whipped cream around the sides of the cake. “I guess we both got what we wanted.”

“We’ve been lucky that way.”

He puts the spatula down, and leans against the counter, looking away. “I wanted something better for Abigail.” His face is hot.

“So did I.”

“Not just—this.” He gestures around them in frustration. “Playing house. She should have had something good.” A glance at her: she’s looking down at her hands in her lap. “You thought I was over-invested.”

“No, I was worried about you,” she protests. “Alright—yes. To some extent. On the other hand …” She fidgets. “I liked that, about you. When you looked at Abigail you saw a real person. She was never just collateral damage.”

“Wasn’t she?” he asks bitterly. “In the end.”

She’s quick to parry. “It’s not your fault that Hannibal killed her.”

He grunts noncommittally and busies himself putting the cake in the fridge.

“She looked at him the same way I used to,” Alana says. “Like he hung the moon. I’d sit with her in therapy and see these glimpses of myself in her.” She makes a sound of disgust. “Or I thought I did. I thought I saw everything so clearly.”

He takes the chair next to her at the table. Her hair has fallen in front of her face as she looks down.

“Hannibal,” she says, “was very good to me, after my mother died.”

“Our little orphans’ club,” he says, and squeezes her hand, just once.

***

That evening, she sits across from him on the couch.

He’s ensconced in his armchair, rereading his beat-up copy of A Sand County Almanac, and with Winston flopped over his feet, Will can’t help feeling warm and quiet inside. His empty cake plate is on the end table. He’s thinking about another slice. Alana was right: it is good.

Alana, however, has been quiet since dinner, and he’s been trying not to pry, not sure if it’s fatigue or something more complicated. It’s beginning to reveal itself as a coiled nervous energy. She picks up and puts down at least three different books in the space of a half-hour, looking dissatisfied, and Saucy, picking up on her mood, is anxious for attention. Alana ruffles her fur for a scant minute, but then gets up, rummaging through her bags.

When she pulls out her manuscript, Will stops thinking about his book, though he tries not to be obvious about it. She sticks the cap on the back of her pen purposefully and flips the binder open. He keeps an eye on her as she reads—not making any notes—for ten or fifteen minutes, a fierce frown of concentration on her face.

“I wish you wouldn’t watch me doing this,” she says without looking up.

He thought he was being stealthy. “Sorry.” He tries to go back to reading. He skips to the August section to reread Leopold’s beautiful description of the riverbanks blooming with wildflowers, but he doesn’t have to be watching to know that she’s not doing any better over there. In his peripheral vision he can practically see the dark knot of tension radiating off her. Even the noise of her turning the pages begins to sound annoyed.

He tries to make his voice gentle. “You don’t have to work on this tonight.”

Wrong thing to say. “Because putting it off has been going so well,” she snaps.

“Oh, my mistake,” he retorts. “I can see you’re really turning the corner now. You’d better keep working.”

He’s sure she’s about to go off on him, but then she sighs, dropping her gaze. “I’m sorry. You’re right, this isn’t helping. I should just do my PT and go to bed.” But she doesn’t get up.

“Do you—want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” she says, tipping her head back against the couch and closing her eyes. He waits for a few seconds, but he’s just about to go back to his book when she speaks up, voice distant and a little dreamy. “I feel like I’ve been torn open. All these layers, therapist, teacher, academic, ripped away. I thought I could hold it all in place by sheer force of will.”

He tilts his head, digesting that. “And what’s underneath?”

“Rubber bands and spare change? I don’t know. I don’t know who I am, if I’m not Dr Bloom.”

In the golden lamplight, he feels closer to her than he’s felt all summer, tucked safe in their cozy den. “That’s why I came up here,” he confesses. “I wasn’t sure I was even alive. I was just—weather. Ghosts. Drifting.”

“Past tense?” she asks, fixing him with a thoughtful eye. “What about now?”

“Now—” He blinks. He doesn’t feel like a ghost. When did that change? “You came looking for me,” he says, swallowing. “And it started to seem—possible.”

The moment is changing, filling with an angular tension he doesn’t want to name. “What did?” she asks softly, Alana with her sharp eyes and steely resolve, her hidden scars, who drove across the country just to share silence under the same roof.

“That there might be someone to find,” he says, and he realizes it’s true as soon as it’s out of his mouth, but it’s too much, and the look she’s giving him is too intent; he flinches away. “I’ve been meaning to—um. You should sleep here—in the bed. For your leg.”

“For my leg.” Brow arched.

“I’ll sleep on the pullout.”

Her eyes are bright. “I don’t want to kick you out of your own room.”

“You liked the hotel bed because the couch has been making your hip ache.”

She looks mildly surprised at that. She eyes him for a second, long enough for him to flush. “Normally I’d protest that it was no trouble, but I hope you don’t mind if I take you up on the offer. Thank you.”

“I’ll grab some of my things and I can be out of your way—” He gets up, feeling rushed.

“I don’t mean to kick you out.” Her smile broadens. “The bed is actually big enough for both of us, you know.”

His heart beats double-time. “I don’t—” he stammers. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he says, and flees.

***

In the morning, he stares at the ceiling of the bedroom. Alana will be asleep for at least another hour and a half, and he has to walk past her to get to the coffee, and all the noise will probably wake her up, and a small part of his brain thinks he really shouldn’t have let his more generous instincts get the best of him.

But sulking only wins him about ten minutes of extra bed time before his caffeine craving forces him up. Of course as soon as his feet hit the ground the dogs hear from the other room, and run to his closed door. They’re good enough not to bark but Winston can’t help whining softly, and he has to get his butt out the door and chivvy them outside before they get themselves really worked up.

By some miracle, all through the gauntlet of morning canine excitement and the various rackets of the caffeination process, Alana rouses only enough to flop over in bed and nuzzle her face half underneath a pillow.

Her hands are tucked up close to her chest, and her hair spills across the pillow in a tangle. He takes a sip of his coffee, eyes tracing her crossed ankles under the blanket. It’s hard to think of a time he’s had this kind of chance to look his fill, without the return fire of her own inquiring gaze. In sleep she looks uncomplicated, undangerous. It’s jarring.

If he’d taken her up on her offer last night, he could slip back into bed now, and listen to her breathing, and drowse the morning away.

He packs his gear and heads out to the river.

***

When he gets home, the cabin is cool after the riotous summer day, and he shucks his shoes and vest with relief. Alana’s sitting at the table with a notepad in front of her. A crumb-covered plate has been pushed off to the side.

“Catch anything?” she asks.

“Few little guys. Threw them back. What about you?”

She gestures at the blank page. “I think I’ve forgotten how to bait the hook.”

“Fly fishermen don’t use bait,” he says, automatically, “the fly is designed to mimic the natural appearance of an insect at a certain stage of life.”

“Yes, Will,” she says, amused.

“Sorry.” He snags her plate on his way to the kitchen and puts it in the sink. “What’s the trouble?”

She’s silent for a moment as he grabs a glass of water. “The other day,” she says, “when you—before I left—you said I was arrogant. Like Hannibal.”

He winces. “I—”

She cuts him off. “It’s okay, I’m not fishing for an apology. Did you know I almost dropped out of grad school?”

He shakes his head, not sure where this is going.

“I’d worked myself into a truly impressive state of burnout, and then spent most of the spring semester watching TV in bed. And then one day Hannibal showed up at the front door of my apartment building wearing Tom Ford and told me I was going to pull it together. And so I did. It was,” she says levelly, “a great kindness.”

“He seemed to work harder than anyone and never get burned out, and I started watching how he did it, so I could copy it: serve others better by keeping your own feelings at a safe remove.” Her smile is grim. “That’s the lesson I thought he was teaching, anyway.”

“But Hannibal never gets burned out because he never gets over-invested. And he never gets over-invested because he just doesn’t believe that anyone else could be his equal.” She stares down unseeing at the table. “I’m starting to see how much more I learned from him than I realized: I wanted to come up here and save you, and I wanted it to prove that Hannibal hadn’t really influenced me, and then I wanted to slip back into my ‘real’ life as though none of it had ever happened.” She shakes her head. “‘Arrogant’ is a lot more generous than most of what I could come up with.”

“And the book?”

She grimaces down at her paper. “It doesn’t feel like a book as much as an … encrustation. Gobs of exposition, stuck together with smugness.”

“I thought it was pretty good,” he says mildly, leaning against the counter.

She laughs a little, at herself maybe, then puts her face in her hands and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. “One step at a time, right?” Sitting between the two shafts of afternoon light from the windows, she almost seems to glow.

“You are actually good at your job,” he says.

Her mouth curves up, but her gaze is steady. “You’re very kind to me.”

“Sometimes,” he says pointedly.

But it doesn’t seem to register; she’s still on some other train of thought. “I’m not sure how good I can possibly be at my job,” she says distantly, “considering that it’s only just now occurring to me that I have to be honest with myself in order to be honest with you.”

This makes Will nervous.

She sits up and squares her shoulders; not a good sign. “I think I need to ask you,” she says. Her voice is almost entirely even. “If you still—if you have feelings for me. I know you turned me down yesterday, and I, I won’t make it your problem any more, if you don’t want me to, but—” She cuts herself off and looks up at him.

Will smiles unhappily and presses his palms into the hard edge of the counter behind him. “See, this is the only reason I have concerns about your professional judgment.” Her brows knit together in concern. He has to turn his face to the window, sneering. “I can’t even walk across a McDonald’s parking lot without losing it. I don’t see what the point is in having a conversation about this.”

There’s a little pause. “You are not going to do this right now,” she says briskly, getting up, “because we are _both_ going to make it, so help me god.” She steers him to a seat and scoots her chair so they’re face to face. “Look,” she says, leaning in, “your behavior in town last week upset me. Partly because I had been overestimating your progress in recovery, and it made me worried for you. Partly because I wished you trusted me more than that.” Her mouth tightens. “Not that I necessarily deserve it.”

He closes his eyes, overwhelmed by the nearness of her. He would really like not to have this conversation.

“And partly because you’re a real dick when you’re upset,” she adds tartly, and a breath puffs out of him somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“But I am not going to let you lose perspective on this,” she continues. “You spent most of last year in an abusive relationship with a psychopath who was using coercive tactics to groom you for violence, and you responded to that by putting your life on the line to capture him, and then—gardening.”

“So,” she says. “You’re working on it.”

He barks a laugh. She doesn’t understand the things he did, the things he felt, or she wouldn’t be so cavalier. But he feels warmth rushing through him like he just downed a shot of whiskey.

She sits back and looks away, out the window. “I wish I could say I wanted to come back based on my professional estimation of your prognosis. That would be—easier.” There’s a stripe of sunburn on her collarbone and a wash of self-mockery in her voice. “But we both know this is much more selfish than that.”

He looks at her, finally. Her face is calm, but her cheeks show a hectic flush. “This isn’t a treatment strategy, Will. This is a—a leap of faith.” That searching blue gaze. “I can’t promise you that you’ll never hurt anyone again.”

The sun pours in dappled through the windows, and the shadows of pine branches sway slowly in the breeze. “No, you can’t.” It’s a relief to say it, finally. She watches him, waiting. “Hannibal thought he was nurturing my best self.”

“What do you think?”

He swallows. Imagines himself one year ago, two: less scarred, but not happier. Soft. And unrecognizable. “I don’t want to go back to being who I was.”

“There’s nowhere back to go,” she says, as the rustle of leaves drifts in on the warm air, and she’s so matter-of-fact that the sun seems to filter down over his whole life, and he leans in and kisses her.

She makes a soft noise and kisses him back, sweetly, raising a hand up to stroke his hair. It’s so easy and he wants it so much, all of it, the soft breeze and the way she coaxes his mouth open, like this is ordinary, like it’s all going to be okay. His heart is racing.

“You taste like peanut butter,” he says, breaking away. That bright-eyed look is lighting up her face. She puts a hand on his thigh, just high enough to be distinctly unchaste, and gives him a devastating smile from beneath her lashes.

He can see how this is supposed to go. He should grin back at her, say something charming, and whisk her off to bed for a mutually satisfying romp, then—grill some fucking steaks or something, make s’mores. Her thumb is stroking the inside of his thigh. It’s everything he could want from a summer vacation fantasy except maybe the gingham-lined picnic basket.

She must see the unease in his face because she cuts out the flirtation like he hit a switch, and pulls back, blue eyes intent.

If he tells her he can’t do this, she’ll nod, turn away, and go back to her notepad, perfectly gentle and correct.

“I just—” he tries, but god, the way she’s looking at him. He wants to drown in it. Fuck. He tugs her back in and kisses her roughly, trying to make his half-formed plea clear through his grip on her arm, his teeth on her lip.

She gives as good as she gets, and does him one better, pausing for a moment to settle herself in his lap, straddling his thighs. He wraps his hands around her ribcage, drunk on her gorgeousness—slim as she is, she’s warm and solid and alive, not half-ghostly the way she looked in June.

A wet nose shoves in between them: Winston, staring up at them in alarm. Saucy’s still lying down, but she’s staring too, head cocked.

Alana laughs. “Don’t like that, do you? Alright, time to go.” She wiggles out of his lap and starts wrangling the dogs out onto the porch. Will looks at her hungrily. Nearly silhouetted in the doorway, her hair loose and her feet bare, talking half-nonsense to the dogs, she might be the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He goes over to her as she shuts the door, and when she leans back against it and smiles up at him, he’s staggered all over again. It’s so awkward and solemn at the same time—putting the dogs out so they can have sex.

It occurs to him that he’s kind of hungry, and he smells like sweat and river muck. He rubs his palms on the hem of his shirt. “Maybe I should go shower off.”

“Trust me when I tell you you’re pulling off the sexy lumberjack look,” she says, taking his hand. “Come on.”

He lets her lead him over to the bed and push him down onto it, unbuttoning his shirt for him. Her hands are gentle and quick. Will submits to it, a blush burning his cheeks. It’s obscurely uncomfortable.

“Did Hannibal let you boss him around in bed?”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when she does, her voice is edged. “Hannibal spent a lot of time fucking me to keep me from talking about you.” There’s a dark hurt there that Will doesn’t want to face.

“And how did you enjoy that?” he snaps back.

She grinds against his crotch, not gently, and he stifles a groan. “Which of us did you want more, Will?” She pulls his head back by his hair so she can bite his neck. Will’s blood is humming, now. He’s never seen her like this. “Do you wish it were him taking off your shirt?”

Anger flashes in him, and he pivots them around, pushing her flat on her back. “He told me he was going to kill you, do you know that? He threatened you right to my face.” Her eyes widen: he’s managed to surprise her. “Oh, yes. And then left me in my cell to go home and make you dinner.” He undoes the fly of her shorts and yanks them down, biting the inside of her thigh, her hipbone. She jerks, hips canting upward.

“I had to watch you taking his side,” he says, and the old helplessness is suddenly so strong he can taste it: all those days and nights, seeing her die, a hundred ways. “You wouldn’t listen to me.” He stares at the pushed-up hem of her shirt, her stomach rising and falling.

She half sits up and cups his cheek. “Will, I’m so sorry—”

There’s something obscene about it. He flinches away. “ _Don’t_ apologize to me, don’t.”

She leans her forehead against his, their noses bumping. “We’re here now. We got out.” The warm breeze feels good on his bare skin. She kisses him softly, like they’re in this together—like they’re really the same, the two of them. He feels dirty and monstrous and painfully turned on.

Alana doesn’t appear to be in any hurry, so he tries to relax into it, taking his time undressing her the rest of the way. She’s sweet and thoughtful, hands and mouth lingering on all the vulnerable parts of him: the thin skin behind his jaw, the base of his throat, the inside of his hip as she takes his pants off. When he lets himself meet her eyes, the seriousness in them makes his stomach flip.

It’s all too easy to imagine everything she wants to forget. Randall Tier, the guy in the parking lot, whatever she knows or suspects about Mason Verger—she wants them all to be flukes, epiphenomena of the passage of Hannibal through their lives. She lets him put his hands all over her without a flinch; she doesn’t want to think about how easy it would be, for example, for him to choke her until she goes limp. Or beat her until her head lolls back and blood trickles from her nose.

He swallows hard and pulls away, framing her shoulders in his hands. “Are you afraid of me?”

Her eyes flicker over his face, trying to gauge him. But her answer is firm. “No.”

He traces his thumb down the line of her windpipe, lets his hand rest heavily at the base of her throat. He can feel her suck in a fast breath, testing against the pressure. He’s not gripping hard enough to cut off her airway, but he could. It would be easy. She doesn’t twist away. His hand looks dark and rough against her creamy skin, and she’s just letting him touch her.

“You don’t scare me,” she says, but her pulse is hammering under his hand, and she’s either a liar or stupid or probably both.

Her whole body is a map of possible wounds and bruises, laid out before him in silent invitation. There’s a sick kind of roaring in his ears. He pinches the underside of her breast, hard enough to bruise. She jerks, back arching. He wants to tell her that she’s making a mistake, but she’s staring up at him, lips parted. He gets a better grip—it will be a nasty bruise—and she lifts her chin to bare her throat.

“So do it, then,” she says fiercely. “Hurt me.”

He shoves her back on the bed and pins her wrists with one hand, reaching between her legs with the other. She’s so wet that her thighs are smeared with it already, and she squirms underneath him as he touches her.

“I told you to hurt me,” she grits out. “But you’re afraid to, aren’t you—”

He slaps her full across the face and she cries out, and it’s all white and he’s flying for a second and he hits her again harder and her eyes flutter shut in pain so she’s finally finally finally not seeing him. His breath is harsh in his ears. He can’t bear to hear her say anything else, so he covers her mouth with his hand as he parts her legs and fucks into her in one long, smooth stroke. He’s not wearing a condom; he doesn’t keep any up here.

Her breath is warm against his fingers. She doesn’t make any move to pull his hand away from her mouth.

“Tell me,” he says before he can think, but she’s obeying his rule, she won’t twist away from his hand, and she won’t say anything. _Tell me what to do, tell me you forgive me_ —but he can’t bring himself to that.

Her dark hair is fanned behind her on the pillow, and her cheek is red where he hit her. She slips one of her hands between her legs, looking up at him as if daring him to say something about it, to admit she’s getting off on this. When her moan vibrates against his hand he has to uncover her mouth so he can hear her properly, so he can kiss the sound off her lips. The kiss is sloppy and distracted and he feels like he’s going to break apart.

“Alana,” he asks, hiding his face in the crook of her neck. “Please.”

Her other hand slides down his back and holds him in close, her hips working against his. “Sweetheart,” she says, voice breaking, and he feels her clench as she starts to come, and that’s it for him, he’s over the edge, face pressed against her cheek.

When his orgasm tapers off, he comes back to himself, babbling apologies into her neck. The sweat is starting to cool on his back. His dick is softening inside her.

She pets him in long strokes from the nape of his neck like a dog. He shudders. “Sh,” she says. “Sh.”

***

It’s a warm, cloudy morning and he’s teaching her to fish.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been his first choice of activities for the day, but she’d asked, yesterday, as she was putting her clothes back on. It had never occurred to him that she might be interested in fishing, but he’s happy enough to let her give it a shot, and so here they are.

He’s outfitted her with his second-favorite rod: a versatile, slow-action carbon-fiber one that’s less finicky than his special-order bamboo. They practice casting behind the house before they set out—she listens to him carefully, eyes lingering on his hands in a way that makes him stammer, and makes a beautiful overhead cast on her second try. The line glides out across the yard, just kissing the grass.

“Look at that,” he says, grinning at the look of delight on her face.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” she retorts. But she flubs the next one, and then two more, all in a row, and there’s no disguising that frustrated set to her jaw.

“You’re moving your arm in an S-shape,” he says, stilling her with a touch. “Think about going straight back-and-stop, straight forward-and-stop.” He demonstrates.

Her next try sails out smoothly. She whoops, bright with triumph.

They do roll casts next, and he shows her some basic knots, and then they head out for the nearest bend of the river. She walks easily beside him, not showing any obvious signs that her hip is bothering her—or that their sexual encounter is bothering her, for that matter. His ears are heating up just remembering it. They haven’t so much as kissed today. He hopped out of bed as soon as he woke up, nominally to pull together their gear, but also in part to avoid having to figure out the new rules between them.

At the river, he gives her an introduction to reading the water: riffles, runs, and pools; fast water and slow water; how to watch and what to look for. “Most of the time it’ll be hard to see the fish itself. It’s often much easier to spot it by its shadow.”

Her lips quirk. “A very psychological idea.”

He weighs that response in his mind. “What shadow have you seen lately, Alana?”

She gives him a dry look, like, don’t play dumb. “Don’t you mean _whose_?”

He nods tightly, watching the water. She’s quartering upstream, which he could tell her isn’t going to do much good with all the drag she’s getting on her line. Sure enough, in a moment there’s a splash: a trout has taken a miss on her fly and motored away.

“Hey!” she says indignantly, “what was that?”

“That was you getting turned down,” he says, and the conversation turns technical as he explains her mistake and shows her some more sophisticated line handling skills.

She’s a good student—no surprise—and she sets to work methodically practicing his tips. It’s a pleasure to watch her thinking through the problem, and he tries to back off and offer only the occasional suggestion. The rhythm of tutoring is coming back to him, patchily. It’s not something he ever did a lot of, but he worked with the rookies sometimes when he was a cop. He liked it then, in the rare cases he managed to relax, and it’s much easier now; he watches her try out mends and low-angle casts with warm satisfaction.

It’s not very long before she gets a real bite. He talks her through bringing it in, his voice low in her ear: she’s all focus, bottom lip caught between her teeth.

It’s a pretty brown trout. It wriggles in her hands and she nearly drops it at first.

“That was good work,” he says. “But he’s under the minimum size. Let me show you how to unhook him and we’ll toss him back.” He takes the hook out of its lip gently, his hands brushing hers, and Alana crouches down to slip it back into the stream. They watch it disappear into the dark clear water.

“You eat what you catch pretty often,” she says.

He keeps his eyes on the water. “Yes.”

“You didn’t stop after—this winter.”

“I’ve been fishing a long time.” He slants a look at her; she’s as bland and amiable as ever. Full therapist face. But it doesn’t annoy him, today. “You didn’t stop eating meat.”

She grants the point with an open-palmed gesture. “But it’s different, to be the means of the transformation. Exerting that power.”

He swats a fly away. “It’s honest.”

“Why?” She tries a roll cast that gets tangled around her rod.

Alana doesn’t usually ask stupid questions. He considers. “Everything eats something. Everything pushes something out of the sunlight. There’s no harmless life. And I can’t get away from that just by living in the woods.”

“Hm.” She’s unwound her knot, and tries the cast again. “So why stay in the woods?”

He should have been prepared for that question, but he’s not. “I—” He thinks of Wolf Trap. Somehow it feels like it’s been weeks since he really remembered it. The memory of the house sweeps over him like a smell, stale with old misery.

“I have to leave soon,” she breaks in, interrupting his reverie. “The semester is going to start.”

Anxiety spikes in his throat, all unwelcome. “I thought you were—what about going on leave?”

She looks unhappy. “That was only wishful thinking, Will. It’s not realistic. I have to go back.”

He makes himself nod. The wind is picking up, and the sky’s bright white has darkened. “The front is coming in,” he says. “We should pack up.”

The bearing-down of an August storm is one of the most beautiful parts of summer at the cabin: the hush and rush of it, the sense that all minds, finding their separate refuges, are drawn together in anticipation. Today, however, he’s having some trouble attending to the majesty. The wind is just so much static in the background. Alana’s leaving—which he knew already, it’s not like he forgot that she’d have to return to Georgetown. He could never want her to give up her career to, what, live out in the boonies and fish? So there’s no reason for him to be upset.

When did she make that decision, anyway? Sometime between their conversation in the hotel and this morning—this morning, almost as if she had just made up her mind. The obvious theory finally occurs to him: just one fuck and she realized what she was really dealing with here. At long last she can see what he’s tried so hard to pretend isn’t true. He’s too unstable to help her.

He tromps through the woods trying to imagine how nice it will be to have the cabin back to himself after she leaves. She glances over at him at the first distant rumble of thunder, but they don’t talk. The wind thrashes the high branches.

The heavens open as soon as they walk through the door, and it takes him a moment to sort out what’s happening. Winston is dancing around frantically, and a desolate crying noise is coming from—somewhere. Lighting-thunder cracks through the air, very close now; a yowl follows.

He takes a second to collect himself, and realizes it’s coming from under the bed: Saucy, hiding, probably scared out of her mind. Will gets down on his stomach and sticks his head under the covers to talk to her. When Zeke was a puppy he was terrified of thunder. Will makes his voice low and soothing and coaxes her slowly towards him, remembering Zeke’s flopsy, too-big ears with a pang of tenderness.

He ends up more or less spooning her on the floor, which is a little dustier than would be ideal. The contact calms her down a lot, though. She shakes at each new burst of thunder, but not as hysterically as she did at first.

When the storm starts to fade into the distance, Alana’s watching them from the couch, Winston’s head in her lap. It’s clear they’ve been there for some time.

He sits up, keeping his hand nice and solid on Saucy’s flank for reassurance.

“Come home with me,” she says.

He blinks, as though he could have misheard. A shiver runs through him. What he wants is to say yes to her. He wants it so bad his stomach and chest and throat are full with it. Not to say goodbye, not to stay here alone—but he thinks of Wolf Trap and his stomach churns.

“Home, to my house,” she says, “if you don’t want to go back to Wolf Trap,” damn her for knowing everything.

Next month will be one year since the Shrike case. The sun will slant warm gold over DC in the long afternoons, over Wolf Trap, over Alana’s house—which he can only remember dimly, through the fog of fever and panic—

“Think about it,” she says, yet another mercy, and he can finally nod.

He picks a fur-clotted dust bunny off his shirt. “My concern,” he says, after a moment, “is your ability to keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed.”

She raises her eyebrows, mock-pensive. “The fishing would be a step down, it’s true. But preliminary reports suggest that the sex would be fantastic.”

The memory of yesterday is raw and ragged-edged. “You’re not—upset.”

Her hand stills in Winston’s thick ruff. “Of course not,” she says, very gently, which makes him more embarrassed. “I was just about to try to seduce you again, actually.”

“Oh,” he says, and ducks his head, yes.

They slip by tacit agreement into the other room, not having the heart to kick the dogs out after all the excitement, and she pulls him into a kiss practically before the door is shut. Kissing her today is easier; letting her unbutton his shirt is easier; it could all almost start to feel normal, although he’s not sure it’s a good idea to let himself get used to this.

He has to tamp down the impulse to ask her again if she’s upset. And maybe if she could elaborate on “fantastic.” The light from the windows is a clear water-gray, and he can almost feel it washing through him, as happiness and shame rise together in his chest. He _hit_ her. God. But holding her in his arms now, he doesn’t want to hurt her.

She’s different than he thought she was, than he used to imagine—as someone undifferentiatedly good, a cool stone statue of mercy. What he took for a hard, glossy shell is just an illusion of her many defenses, all patchier and more fragile than he expected. She can be prickly and harsh, stiff with wounds that run just as deep as his own. But down below that, below even the kindness that he finds so overwhelming, is an integrity steady and unending as a river. She makes mistakes—he’s not going to forget that any time soon. But he’s starting to believe she will always make amends.

Her hair is still up, fastened back with a tortoiseshell clip, and he nudges her to turn around so that he can take it out. His fingers are a little clumsy as he slips it from her hair—slow—wary of catching errant strands. The thick coil of her hair unfurls down her back and he noses at the nape of her neck, pressing kisses against her skin, inhaling the clean sweat smell of her hair.

He thinks next he’s going to take her shorts off, start getting things going, but she leans back against him a little and he finds himself wrapping his arms around her to keep her there, flush against him. It’s a lovers’ pose, a relationship pose, his unshaven cheek against her soft one, and his chest is tight with a strange kind of nerves, not sure what he’s trying to say to her, not sure she understands—if maybe she just wants him to get on with it.

Raindrops slip down the windowpane, heavy with light, and he feels that heavy and trembling in his body, full to brimming. He’s not a big guy by anyone’s estimation but he feels every inch he has on her, in his height and the breadth of his shoulders, with her narrow frame warm against him.

She hugs his arms to her. “Oh, my Will,” she says softly, and he can see now the color of a great sadness in the rainy light. It’s all around them, they’re in the swim of it, together, and he feels so close to her, but still there’s a gap, a distance, an urgency he can’t articulate.

He lets her go so they’re face to face again, and tries to think of what to say. The moment lengthens; her gaze turns sharp.

“What is it?” she asks.

He looks away, uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to stop?”

That would be worse, much worse. He shakes his head. Picks up her hand in his and presses her knuckles to his mouth. “Can you—tell me,” he says. “What I should do.”

He shifts under her scrutiny, but maybe he’s getting used to it, because for once he doesn’t want her to look away. She cups his cheek in her palm just the way she did so many months ago. His face is burning now, too, but not with fever.

She traces her thumb across his lower lip and his eyelids drop shut, lips parting. An intoxicating, vibrant silence fills his head as he waits for her to give him a cue. His tongue darts to the inside of his lip, not quite daring to meet her finger. When the pressure disappears a moment later, he comes back to himself, opening his eyes with an effort.

Alana doesn’t look any more composed than he feels, staring back at him with flushed cheeks and dark eyes. “Okay,” she says, a little breathlessly. “I think I’m wearing too many clothes.” She strips out of what’s left of her outfit as he watches, still a little dumbstruck, and then raises her eyebrows at his own dog hair-ridden ensemble.

Once he’s divested himself of his shirt and shorts, awkward under her appraising eye, she kisses him again, trailing a possessive hand down his chest. His hardon is making itself conspicuous, but when she reaches lower, he stops her with a shake of his head.

She reevaluates him thoughtfully, then sits at the edge of the bed. “Come here.”

He stands in front of her uncertainly. She nods at the space in front of her. Oh. He drops readily to his knees on the hardwood floor, and looks up at her, mouth watering, then presses his face into her crotch and inhales through her panties. She’s sweaty and musky and he is unbearably turned on.

“Yes,” she says softly. “That’s right.”

He reaches up and slips her panties down, kissing the top of her knee, and then pulls them to her ankles. She kicks them off neatly and he parts her knees, trailing a line of nips up her thigh. “Don’t be cute,” she says, “hurry up.”

Her cunt is slick and delicious and when he licks her, she shivers. He doesn’t need any urging to dive in and find what she likes, and soon her breathing is ragged and her hand is urgent and demanding at the back of his head.

Her hips are bucking underneath him, trying to get him closer, but he has to spare a moment to tug his cock out of his boxers and start stroking himself. Not elegant, but right now he doesn’t care.

Slipping two fingers into her makes her gasp and turn basically incoherent, falling back onto her elbows, and he takes the cue to fuck her steadily with his mouth and hands until she tosses her head back and cries out, beautiful as anything.

Once he’s drawn out the aftershocks for her as well as he can, he leans his head against her thigh and works his dick faster, panting. It crosses his mind to be embarrassed: he’s kneeling between her legs, beating off, as turned on as he’s ever been in his life and she’s barely touched him. But he can’t focus on that thought. The taste of her is still in his mouth and her hands are in his hair and touching his face and she’s talking to him, low and insistent.

“You look so good,” she says. “Do this for me, Will.”

Eyes closed, he nods slightly against her leg. His breaths are coming ragged now—he didn’t know how much he wanted this, but he could stay here forever, listening to her voice in his ear, letting her tell him it’s alright.

“Let me take care of you,” she’s saying, “let me hold you just like this, come home with me, Will, sweetheart, stay with me, I don’t want to leave you—”

With a strangled gasp, he comes all over the floor in front of him, and slumps against her there, head in her lap, eyes shut tight. Breathing is about all he can manage, around the lump in his throat. The rain drubs steadily on the roof.

Finally he sits up a little and scrubs a hand over his face, then dares a glance at her.

Her hair’s a mess and she looks at him with new understanding. “You’re not coming, though,” she says quietly. “Are you.”

“I usually try to wipe my come off the floor before I start any serious conversations,” he says, but his laugh is shaky.

“It’s okay,” she says staunchly, when his silence becomes uncomfortable. “You have to do what’s right for you.” Platitudes and suspiciously bright eyes.

His hands are clumsy, reaching for his wadded-up shirt. “I just—”

“—God, Will, use a tissue,” she cries, momentarily distracted, but he’s already almost done cleaning the floor, and the shirt was going in the wash anyway. “Put that in the hamper and come up here.”

He climbs up onto the bed with her, suddenly exhausted. If she hadn’t said it out loud, he could have kept himself from knowing what his answer was going to be for two or three more days. He had been hoping that he could change this part of the story.

She’s lying facing the window, and doesn’t turn towards him right away. He stills in the middle of reaching for her when he sees her swipe the back of her hand across her face.

He feels sadness thick over them like a blanket, all his fault, once again. “I’m sorry,” he says, haltingly.

She rolls onto her back, closing her eyes. “Please don’t apologize to me,” she says, a little hoarse, but gentle.

“I’m just—not done. Yet.” With whatever this is, out here.

She looks at him seriously. “He’s going to come back for you.”

He swallows, and nods. It’s not something he can forget, although he’s come closer this week than he ever expected to. “But you’ll help me.”

She takes his hand and presses a kiss to it, in a mirror of his own gesture. “Always,” she says.

The rain is tapering off now, and through the blinds he can see broken sun falling over the rain-drenched yard. He curls close against her, and they watch the sunbeams sweep to the west.


End file.
